Mrbrock
Active Member
I understand you know a lot more about this than me but you keep stating IAAI is a salvage auction company and that we should assume that any vehicle being put through their auctions has a salvaged title. Am I wrong in that being your main take away message? Because if so, the explain this:I think your confusion here is that you are assuming that I am assuming. And you are hung up on this concept of a salvage auction, when I am assuming (see what I did there) that you have no experience in the wholesale automobile industry. These are not assumptions:
See the last point in my post above. If @Hormold saw a signed title (but it is critical to remember, as @MP3Mike pointed out, that this title was not the new title issued by the DMV), then one of 4 things is likely:
- Going to market as a salvage auction is something very meaningful in the wholesale industry. It segments buyers and sellers and it defines the pricing for all of the cars in the lanes. A good car in a salvage auction would fall well short of its potential value. It would be very unusual for a seller to send a good car to a salvage auction.
- IAAI's blanket disclosure is explicitly telling every buyer to assume any car is salvage.
- There are not many possibilities - there are only a few. But the key piece of information we do not have, and will not have, is why did Tesla send seemingly good cars to a salvage auction.
- You are assuming it is fraud to sign a clear title if the car has an NMVTIS salvage record. You would have to ask the IAAI and DMV title clerks. In my experience, auction title clerks are on a first-name basis with state title clerks and are super-experts in title management. I don't know CA DMV, but it is possible that there is a direct path for title branding that auctions use because they do it in high volume.
- You are also assuming that a car with a salvage NMVTIS record must also have a salvage brand on the CA title. Seems odd to me too, but I am not going to assume that both are necessary. CA explicitly calls out NVMTIS as a legal requirement for dealers to show retail buyers.
The key to all of this is to give the two affected people the best possible guidance in how to get to their best possible outcomes. So, giving them bad guidance and false faith could set them back. With the new (to me) info about Person #1's title, I advise that his best path is to go directly to the selling auction and ask them if the NMVTIS salvage record was reported in error, then depending on the answer, ask if the title is to be branded salvage. IAAI is the one source of truth in what happened or should have happened.
- The car was not meant for salvage and IAAI reported the salvage record to NMVTIS in error
- The car was meant for salvage, and the IAAI sent the salvage processing paperwork to CA in parallel with IAAI signing the title over to Prime Sales
- The car was meant for salvage, but the auction made a clerical error with the title
- The car was meant for salvage and IAAI instructed Prime Sales to handle the salvage processing with CA
Before writing this note, I was be listening to and analyzing a recorded presentation of a company's title management and processing team to help them improve. They handle 10,000 titles a day for all 50 states + US territories. I am not a CA title expert, and we will not get into the weeds of each individual state, but I am familiar with this space.
Who are we to believe? IAAI or you? I take their disclosure to mean that because they handle a lot of (NOT ALL) salvage vehicles that sometimes the paperwork will show as salvage when it is not and that it is up to the buyer to verify with the seller, auction house and relevant state authorities to ensure the paperwork is processed correctly if the vehicle has a clean title.
Again, to my previous point, if Tesla wants to claim these as salvage, they need to do so before they go to auction and file the paperwork so the car has a salvage title at auction and is presented as such. It can’t have a clean title at auction then be changed to salvage after by the auction house on teslas behalf because they no longer can claim ownership and only owners or stakeholders can make this claim. This would be like listing a new item on eBay, using it and slightly damaging it while the auction is running then shipping it and telling the buyer that it is now used/damaged AFTER you took their money for a NEW item and it is their problem to deal with now since you don’t accept returns.