“Sure, someone just totaled my car but I can “just come back later when the market changes”.”

Are you saying 9/10 people who buy a car are buying it because they got in an accident? There were 13.7 million new cars sold in 2022. I doubt you'll find 13.7 totaled cars in 2022.

And it still stands to reason that if somebody got in an accident, why would they turn around and buy a new car with a big mark up and massive waiting period when they can just walk onto a lot and get a good used car for much less?

So I'm required to make effort to refute numbers, but you're not required to make effort to substantiate them? Huh...

> Are you saying 9/10 people who buy a car are buying it because they got in an accident?

I never said any such thing. I just think the number is higher than 1/10.

> There were 13.7 million new cars sold in 2022. I doubt you'll find 13.7 totaled cars in 2022.

I wouldn't expect to. But I'd definitely expect the number to be over 1.37 million.

Hurricane Ian alone resulted in 400,000 vehicles damaged[1], and that was just one environmental event, before we look at collisions.

Washington State (with 2.3% of the US population) reported 104,000 collisions [2]. So we might extrapolate to somewhere in the order of 5 million collisions a year. Indeed, that number is probably closer to 6 million [3].

So we're already approaching 7 million vehicle 'incidents' a year including collisions and one 'act of god'. I think it's reasonable to set a number of 8 million when you factor in all the other tornados, hurricanes, hail storms and others.

It's hard to determine what fraction of those are total losses. However...

US insurers paid out $173B in losses. [4]

$173B across 8 million incidents is around $21,000. Now in a good number of those losses there are 2, or more vehicles involved, which increases the number some. But even if we assume that say 50% of collisions involved another vehicle, then we have an an average auto loss of $10K per vehicle per collision.

Most insurers work on a 70/75 rule for total loss, that is, if the cost to repair the vehicle exceeds 70 or 75% of its value, it is written off.

So if your collision results in "only" a $2-3K repair bill (which can be cheap these days), then you can see that there's a notable amount of payouts on total losses. (It's also hard to get a value of the average vehicle on the road in a given year - insurers are the only ones who'd likely be able to supply that information, and it would be buried somewhere in actuarial tables more than anything).

It's not 9/10. Nor did I ever say it was.

But if I had to make an estimate, I'd say it was closer to 2 or 3/10.

[1] https://www.automotive-fleet.com/10183423/carfax-estimates-h...

[2] https://www.weierlaw.com/2022-washington-state-car-accident-...

[3] https://www.simplyinsurance.com/how-many-people-die-in-car-a...

[4] https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/auto-insurance-s...