2023 Watkins Glen (Part 3)
17 Aug 2025“The Auction”
I don’t really know how or why I started looking into auctions, but I had read about websites like Copart and IAAI before on reddit and other fora. These are websites where cars totaled by insurance are auctioned online. These cars are in various states of disrepair: completely smashed up balls of metal to slightly “hail damaged” cars.
The other issue was that since I am in NY, I couldn’t directly bid on these websites. I had to find a broker. There were several options I tried and considered on Copart, since they allowed you to bid directly with a credit card and small deposit. They all had various broker fees (5-7%) in addition to the auction fees. So for example, if I paid 15k for my auction vehicle, the broker fees alone would be 1k; the auction fees are also around 1-2k. Quite substantial! Eventually, I settled on go2auctionsnow.com. It was on a janky web 1.0 website, but they charged a flat fee (150), customer service was curt but quick, and everything seemed to work. The ones with polite customer service hire people specifically to do customer service. If someone is curt and in a hurry, they probably have other work to do. Classic signs of a volume operation. I compared Copart and IAAI, and it turned out that Copart charges 250 for membership and IAAI charged 100. I also liked that IAAI had “engine running” videos, but copart didn’t; they only had pictures. So IAAI it was!
I started out by looking for hail damaged or lightly damaged vehicles that I could fix-up easily. I didn’t have the know-how to do body work, but glass is easily replaced and mechanical parts are easy as long as it’s not the engine or transmission. Frame straightening seemed complicated as well, and not really worth the risk.
There were crazy fights over what I thought were the weirdest cars: an ‘05 4Runner had bids from Tripoli and Benghazi and would easily run up to about 10k-15k. Tacomas sold like hotcakes. Meanwhile, decent looking Fords, Buicks and Chevys sold for a few 100s to a few thousand. The Toyota TaxTM is real.
My original budget was about 4-5k for a Honda Fit or old SUV like the Acura MDX. We really thought hard about this: a cheap Fit is a reliable family hauler that can double as an occasional track car. A Fit would cost maybe 3000 total, including fees and shipping. An SUV in good shape looked closer to 10k. But my wife used her womanly ways on me: “Why not get an SUV that can do it all; tow, road trips, soccer mom stuff”. We have had our old Civic for about 11 years, and it showed its age. Lots of dings and scratches, rust everywhere, and the usual 100k maintenance items: belts, alternator, tensioner, a/c compressor.
We made a large list of cars we were interested in, and started following the auctions for a couple of days. I lusted after a green, single-owner Tacoma for a few days, but then it looked rusty and I learned about the frame rot issues Toyota was having in that generation. There are shops, especially on the East coast, that do frame repairs, but they cost about $1500 that I would have to factor in. I looked into Acura MDXs, but these had oil consumption and transmission issues. Then I saw a GX 460 on IAAI. I hadn’t really considered it before since it was from a “luxury” brand that really wasn’t on my radar. I’m pretty utilitarian when it comes to life, luxury does not do anything for me. But it looked in great shape: it had a reliable Toyota V8, a 6200 lb tow capacity, and the hail damage it was totaled for was barely noticeable.
The previous night, my wife and I had decided we would bid on a few different cars: a few MDXs I was expecting to get for about 5k shipping included, the GX, some 4Runners that I expected would easily get to 20k and hadn’t a snowflake’s hope in hell of getting, and a Ridgeline with a broken windshield. I had put in a $1000 deposit on go2auctionsnow.com so I could bid up to $20000, and had looked at the Carfaxes of all the cars I was looking at; I get them for cheap on some reseller’s website. The GX looked especially good: single owner, one minor fender bender in its early years, and metronomically dealer serviced every 5000 miles. The ACV, or actual cash value was listed at 17.8k, before repairs.
There was a title issue with the GX, but it looked like it was some clerical error after it was totaled! Somebody had misprinted the mileage. I asked a title litigation lawyer (or so they claimed) on reddit and they said dealers do not touch vehicles with title issues, and for private parties with good records, it may not be an issue at all. I smelled a deal: if dealers weren’t gonna bid up the GX, maybe we can get it for less than the ACV! So that night, my wife and I set ourselves a hard budget: 15k. Though we wanted to spend around 5k for an MDX or equivalent, given how nice the GX looked, we were willing to stretch it and take a bit of a risk.
Then came auction day. I was running around at work, and my wife was going to do the bidding from home, but I managed to jump on the computer during a break and took over the bidding, while my wife watched the auction remotely. I tried bidding on a 4Runner, but that immediately went to 28k within seconds of coming up on the block. Goshdarned overlanding crowd. Soon it came down to the GX. It immediately jumped up to 12k from a pre-bid, and it was very slowly bid-up: 12, 12.5, 13… In the end, there were only two people bidding, one from Portland and one from Iowa. As we had predicted, the Texas and California dealers left this one alone because of title issues. Both my wife and I were watching. They traded bids, and it seemed stuck on 17.3 until a last-minute bid of 17.5 showed up from Iowa. My wife sent me a message: “Was that you! WTF! I thought we agreed on 15k.” It was me. My broker was from Iowa. What had I done?
I started freaking out: what if this thing had something horribly wrong with it, what if the engine had rod knock, what if the transmission was on its way out. I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept asking my wife, “What have I done, what are we going to do?” She kept reassuring me: “It’s ok hun, we did the due diligence, we did the work, it will be alright.” “Are you not feeling nervous about this?” “No, I’m feeling oddly calm about it,” she replied. It was very helpful.
The inspection
The next morning, I was in worst-case-scenario mode. I asked my wife to call the IAAI lot and figure out how much it would cost to relist it. “If it’s a dud, let’s get rid of it ASAP.” Surprisingly, seller fees are low on IAAI, just a hundred or so. The buyer ends up paying most of the fees. In the meantime, I also looked into various inspection services that could go to the lot and check it out. Most of the local guys wanted to charge about $300. In the end, I decided to use IAAI’s contracted third party service, carinspector.us. This way, they would have easy access to the car, and I wouldn’t have to worry about coordinating access through the IAAI lot manager. This cost me about $150, but it would take at least 2 business days. I only had about 5 business days to pick up the car! We were on the clock.
I was in Utah or Montreal or some place like that while the inspection was happening. While I was waiting at the airport for my flight back home, I got an email from the inspector. Hands trembling, I opened the email. Engine, check. Transmission, check. No leaks, some not-so-serious electrical codes, probably due to the low battery from sitting in an insurance lot. Phew.
The transport
We weren’t done yet. The next stressful part was getting the car here. Here we enter into the murky waters of the auto shipping industry, with tons of brokers and websites that will sell your contact information and flood your phone and email with solicitations. We’d used a company called TCI Logistics in the past. They found us a driver quickly, and he transported our car across the country safely. We started there again, but their price was quite high. Searching the internet, we were again presented with a myriad of options that made us a little wary. So we spent some time figuring out how this works:
- There is a national, computerized, unified list of people needing auto transport with car type, pickup and destination, and offer amount listed. This is called “Dispatch”.
- Brokers have access to this board, and list a price/offer along with pickup and destination.
- If the transport drivers think the price is right, they accept the offer, and the broker puts the driver in touch with the client.
- You usually pay the broker a fee of about $100-150 and then pay the driver the rest of the money on delivery.
- Once you’re put in touch with a driver, you have to ensure the driver carries an insurance policy.
Choosing a broker is the hard part. Some brokers will reel you in with crazy low prices. But no driver wants to take the low offers! So you may have to wait days or maybe weeks to find someone who wants to take your car. So the trick is to do some research online, pick from a variety of places, and read reviews. We were on a time crunch (it had to be picked up rapidly from IAAI, otherwise we would pay a storage fee of about $25-50 a day), and so we had to find a broker willing to ship for a decent price.
Some websites are pretty shady: you put in your shipment details, and they will sell your “lead” to a huge variety of brokers. These brokers will harass you months after you’ve had your car shipped. Avoid such websites at all costs!
Another option is uship.com. Here, you can list your shipment (it doesn’t even have to be a car), and the brokers then bid on your shipment. Uship takes a cut once you accept a bid. It’s auctions all the way down! What I’ve found is that after uship.com takes its cut, it’s more expensive than if you’d approached the same broker directly. But it’s a good way to figure out what a decent price for the shipment is.
In the end, we went with Tempus Logix. They took their cut of about 100-150 for a total of about 800-900. The shipment got picked up fairly quickly by a shipping company that regularly transports between Texas and here. This part went fairly seamlessly, and finally it was here.
It’s here
A little dirty, but started and ran great. Bonus pic: little gremlin.
Total cost
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Auction bid | 17500 |
| IAAI fees | 1300 |
| Bullshit IAAI fees | 350 |
| go2auctionsnow fees | 200 |
| Avoidable paypal and wire transfer fees | 100 |
| Shipping | 800 |
| Total | 20250 |
It was a pretty decent deal in the end. Equivalent cars were going for 22-28k here. It would have been much cheaper if the car weren’t as desirable.
The only things I needed to fix were a radiator leak (they’re known to go at around 100k), and a squeaky bearing in one of the engine accessories. I also did a decent amount of preventive maintenance: oil change, transmission fluid drain-and-fill, etc.
I was so worried about it driving well, but it was a peach. Smooth, clean, reliable. The view from sitting up high in a big SUV was great, and the instant torque from the purring V8 was very satisfying. My wife had her misgivings: “It’s so big, it boats around the corners, it’ll be hard to find parking” etcetera, etcetera, so on and so forth. A week later, I get a text:
I had done good.
The caged track/race car
To be continued…