This comes up from time to time and I felt that this needed a post.
Let me preface this by saying that I'm a dealer and I probably run, I dunno, 20+ Carfax reports a day and evaluate 20+ cars a day.
A minor accident, say a scuffed bumper, when reported to the Police, will generally end up as an accident reported on your car's Carfax/Autocheck report. I would say that virtually every accident that's on a vehicle history report (VHR) is from a police report. Period.
Now, on a late model car this is, as a general rule of thumb, about a 10% or so hit to your car's value even if the damage was very minor. In an extreme example that comes to mind was a year old Bentley Continental Convertible where a $1,000 claim to repair a scuffed bumper ended up costing the owner $30,000 in lost value due to the car having a "bad Carfax" (YOU try selling a year old Bentley with an accident on the Carfax... I dare you).
So, if your car has very minor cosmetic damage, you may want to think it over before you make a police report if you can avoid it. If your car is in a legit accident, go ahead and make that report. But if you come out of the grocery store to a scuffed bumper, you may want to reconsider making that report.
Submitted July 01, 2019 at 07:00PM by rld14 https://ift.tt/2KSb2HD
