5 Cars HIDING DAMAGE At the Salvage Auction Featuring: Ferrari 458, BMW M4, WRX STI

Hey guys and welcome back. In one of the earliest videos I posted to YouTube, I showed you how you can uncover previous accident damage that was either doctored up or hidden by a third-party reseller at the salvage auctions. Now this gives you a huge advantage when you're shopping for a car at the auction for a rebuild project. Buying a car that's been previously doctored up usually contains more headaches than a car that has straightforward damage. And what I mean by straightforward damage is damage that happened during an accident or some other occurrence and the car was then left in that state. All the damage is straightforward. We know what happened. Somebody didn't go over with a paintbrush and try and hide things to make it look better in photos to get you to bid higher and then buy a car that you'll be undoing their work to get to the original issue. Today we'll head over virtually to the salvage car auctions and find five cars that have been previously doctored up and are now for sale. Come and join me. All right, so we're going to start with this 2016 Subaru WRX STI. It's at Copart and all the cars we'll be looking at today will be at Copart. However, in future episodes we will be looking at cars at other salvage auctions, sometimes maybe even eBay or private listings as well. And this car was actually sold. It has a California salvage certificate and basically what we can see if we look close in the first photo is a little crack down on the lower bumper here, but you know everything at really quick first glance looks very good. I can see that this hood line is off and it's off quite a bit. This headlight looks like it's pushed in a little bit and again just some minor scraping on the front. The grilles are intact and overall there's our front end damage. Looks very minor. Now when we get in the interior we do see that an airbag has deployed and usually in minor fender benders and especially something that just looks like it might have touched the front end, like we're assuming here, your airbag shouldn't deploy. Now I always like to look at the engine bay photos and I think they tell us a lot and a Subaru STI is a very nice car obviously. These are fairly expensive cars and right here where you see the bumper just kind of push pinned in or screwed in to the main front support area it just doesn't look correct. On nicer cars and pretty much all cars nowadays these sort of areas are kind of hidden and look a little nicer. This also might look like it's out of alignment. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I'm not 100% familiar with a 2016 STI as I've never owned one, but let's take a look. This is a really quick check that you guys can do. It's very simple. We'll type in the Google 2016 Subaru WRX STI engine bay and then just go and click Google Images and this is exactly what our engine bay should look like. Now here's a great shot of a 2016 WRX STI engine bay. You can actually see where some of those fasteners are. Fasten the front bumper on, but this obviously seems much more in alignment than it did in this photo here. This seems a little bit crooked and this plastic might have been cracked or just out of sorts in this photo, which tells us that likely the impact was past the front bumper. And we'll continue on with our photos and there's our straight on photo again. Honestly, the way that this bumper is shown to us in this photo, it looks like it could be repaired, but again we don't really know until we get the car in front of us. So in order to find out whether this car was doctored up or not, we have our suspicions after looking at the photos. All I do is I search Google for the VIN number and right there you can already see the images have popped up. Our first images show us this same exact car and this would be likely on a broker site or some other site and that's what it actually looked like. These are likely the original accident damaged photos. Here's another one and I'll show you one more. Here's the last one and this is what we want to obviously stay away from at the auction. This car was heavily damaged, clearly has some front end frame damage here and in the listing it looks like it's an easy fix. Now let's move on from the Subaru to this 2016 BMW M4. Now sometimes the searches aren't as straightforward like we'll see here, although you'll still be able to find things fairly easy. So let's take a look at our photos again. We got some scuffs on the front bumper here, some scuffs down the fender and all along the side skirt. If you do look, this again the hood line is off, the hood gaps are bad and also looks like the fender gaps are quite a bit off as well, especially here where they meet the pillar and will continue to go down. Mostly light bumper damage here, bad hood lines. This side, the driver's side of the car looks fairly good and then the trunk. The trunk is a mystery. It could be open or it could just be really off and after seeing this damage here, it's likely that the trunk is off quite a bit. So if we look in the interior, we don't see any airbags. Now if we keep going down, the interior looks like a standard interior. But right here at the engine bay, that's a photo like I said I like to look at, I like to search and this M4 engine bay looks pretty good. But there's one pretty major thing missing and that is the fact that the aprons, which are the sides that hold on your fenders, are missing out of the photo. We can't really see those, so we don't have the best judgment when it comes to this photo. We continue to scroll down. Here's our front end shot, which it looks like it's off quite a bit. But again, if someone's unsuspecting, we would maybe guess that this car would be an easy fix. It says that it has front and rear end damage. So we'll take this VIN number, we'll search Google for it. So here's the Google Images search. These are the photos we just saw, so nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe this car doesn't have any problems, but you do want to be pretty thorough and look. Now we see this tiny little thumbnail here and we see it's got pretty heavy front end damage and it says that the VIN number is 8668. But one of the big differentiating factors, and typically this is a good way to check, if you look at the wheels on this car, and I'm pretty familiar with this era BMW M3 M4, these wheels look like they're from a generation before the E92 generation. But either way, we take a look at these wheels and we'll go back. Compared to the wheels that are on this car, this is a five spoke design. This has more than five spokes, so this is not our car. So we keep scrolling and this looks like it might be our car and it likely is our car. This came from the insurance auto auction originally and now it's at Copart. While every single photo didn't show up to us on Google, it shows that it's got pretty heavy rear end damage with likely some pretty good suspension damage and also this front end was hit pretty hard too. Now all of this in this car still says it's a run-and-drive and that's because when Copart lists a car as a run-and-drive, it basically means the car moves a few feet forward a few feet back under its own power and nothing more than that. Doesn't mean you could get into it and drive cross-country. There could be major problems everywhere else, but as long as the car moves a few feet forward, a few feet backward, the engine could be knocking. It could be overheating while it's doing so. As long as it does that, that classifies it as a run-and-drive. So let's move on to this car, a 2014 Maserati Quattroporte in California with a salvage certificate. 31,000 miles and it looks pretty darn good. Newer car, 30,000 miles. Again another front end collision as most the cars at the auction with accident damage are front end collisions. I want you to take note at this. This should throw up a red flag for some of you guys. This sort of damage on the fender and the bumper, you can see it was pushed and creased pretty well at one point. Plastic will crack and metal will crush like almost crushing a piece of aluminum foil. When you crush a piece of aluminum foil, it's pretty tough to pull it back out completely straight. And so when we look at this, it looks like it was crushed in at one point and then pulled back. See all the ripples like a piece of crushed aluminum foil. In an accident, that metal would obviously just be crushed. And unless somebody was trying to maybe doctor a car up, it wouldn't really look like this. And we look at the bumper in the rear, just a little minor side swipe damage, no big deal. Keep going down. But look at this, all the airbags deployed. We have an airbag here, an airbag here. If you look really close, you have an airbag coming out of the seat. Sometimes these airbags in the ceilings, if you've ever seen the video of my money pajetta, I'll link it above right now. I had a situation where the third party that sold me my car cut the airbags out of the ceiling and then tucked whatever was remaining back in the car. So that way you wouldn't notice that a ceiling airbag was out. Now I'm not saying that's the case with this car, but we always have to suspect everything because airbag damage is very expensive. We'll continue to look. The back seat looks completely normal and the engine bay looks very good. Again, missing those side aprons. So we really can't tell. And the fact that this fender in this photo right here was pretty well damaged. We would definitely want to take a look at the driver's side fender to make sure it looked well. But following all of those photos, everything looks fairly normal. And so we're here, here on top of the photos we just looked at, except for this last photo, which again was on salvage bid, salvage bid, a broker and a broker that I personally like for the insurance auto auction. Here's what seems to be this car originally. Again, we don't have every single photo, but we have enough to tell us that this car had a pretty major front end collision and had a little bit of front end work done to it to be put right back through auction. Now without putting your hands directly on this car in person, it's pretty impossible to tell what sort of work was done to this car. However, it is known that people will buy a car from auction in order to make it look a little bit better and run it right back to the auction because it is definitely easier and less time consuming in most cases than actually buying a car to completely rebuild it and then resell it. And a lot of times it warrants the same profit or around the same amount of profit in less time. Our second to last car is this 2017 Mercedes-Benz SL 450. Arguably it looks in the best shape out of all the cars we've looked at, at least from this angle. Again, in California, you notice a lot of the nicer higher end cars out in California. 4,000 miles, so basically a new car we have here. Let's take a look at the larger photos. We see a little crinkle right here in the fender, similar to that Maserati. This damage doesn't look like it was untouched after an accident. It does look like it might have been moved a little bit. We'll continue to look. Okay, and here we can see the hood gaps from this angle look fairly off. We see that the fender doesn't line up perfectly with the front bumper, but hey, you know, there could just be a few screws or something missing. Headlight is popped out. We continue going down. The rear end looks really pretty great and we'll look at this angle too. Looks very good. Here's no airbags in the cabin that we can visually see and otherwise this car looks kind of straightforward. Maybe it is either a reflection or maybe a little bit of scuffing in the rear, but our damage is seems contained in this front driver's side corner. Now looking at the engine bay at first glance and Mercedes, as this is a design they've been using for a long time, these air intake ducts, one of them is just completely missing here. And remember the car was hit on this side, so that's kind of strange. I think what we'll want to do for this car is do a quick google search of what the engine bay should look like. And here's our photo of the engine bay. You'll notice that everything looks very similar except there is some plastic covering that is missing from here, which tells me that this car was hit hard enough for these pieces of plastic to likely be cracked, taken out, and discarded so that it looks a little bit better. But Mercedes generally does a very good job of hiding a lot of the engine bay with covers. So we'll do our usual google trick here. Search the VIN number. As you can see, here's the original front fender damage on the passenger side fender. Here's the driver's side. It was definitely hit a bit harder than shown. You can see this headlight right here. It's completely destroyed now. I'm not sure if maybe they grabbed another one from another car, bought one from the junkyard to put it in this photo, but that in my opinion is slightly deceptive saying, hey well the headlight it just popped out, you know, it didn't get damaged in the accident, so the damage isn't really that bad. Obviously there was a problem. This headlight was destroyed and this headlight is definitely not the same as this headlight unless they did some really amazing job super gluing. Here's another photo of this same car and like we suspected everything's good except for that front end, but it's definitely not as good as it's being depicted in these photos. So here's this 2015 Ferrari 458. 6,000 miles. Now one other major issue that we didn't see with the other cars is that this is a certificate of destruction which basically means that it's no longer allowed on public roads without a whole lot of legwork to get things back where they were and typically there's a lot of legalities you might run into on the process. This is a very difficult thing to deal with and you don't want to be blindly buying a car not knowing what the title part means. So a certificate of destruction is also usually issued on cars with pretty severe damage and the insurance company is always going to take a larger loss if they list something with a certificate of destruction title because it will always fetch less auction than your comparable car with a salvage or rebuild title. So if we go here and we'll check out these photos. Again this car seems like it's a very simple fix. We got some bumper damage in the front and this from this angle the hood doesn't line up the best. It looks like you know we can work with it. Now if we look from this angle more cracking in the bumper. The headlight looks like it might be damaged. The fender looks like it's rippled a little bit here. We continue looking. This back corner looked like it was just bumped. You know a mirror. Someone just bumped into something. No big deal. When you look at this car it makes you wonder why would this car be deemed a certificate of destruction. We look in the front here. Both the dashboard and the steering wheel airbag have deployed. That's never a good sign. And here's our 2015 458 and here is the moment that I think probably most of you've been waiting for since we pulled this car up. This one is completely in your face. Here are the original accident damage photos. They are pretty bad. And this whole front and look at this is the front support of the car. Let's get the other angle. Look at how far over this front support was pushed. The whole wheel and tire assembly completely got ripped off as well as this piece of suspension assembly. This car had some very very serious accident damage and this is why you always have to do your due diligence when bidding on a car. One of the biggest questions I get is this car looks like it's in pretty good shape. Do you see anything wrong with it? And it might not be at first glance that you see something wrong with it but if you do your due diligence and do a little bit of legwork you can usually find out whether it's a good car for your very own rebuild project. Just because we found some of these cars with previous damage that it might have been hidden or doctored up doesn't mean that there's not a ton of great opportunity to be had at the salvage auction. If you enjoyed what you saw today be sure to follow me on Instagram where I announce all my live streams early and we tend to look for cars like this and cars that you should bid on. If you have any questions about anything you've seen in this video or any general questions at all don't hesitate to contact me. All the information to do so is in the description box below. Be sure to leave a comment and if you learned something I'd appreciate if you like this video. Thanks for watching and I'll catch you very soon.