Giant storms have the potential to influence car prices across the territory over the course of several months, as several cars are lost in parallel.
“A car that has been flooded is fundamentally rotting from the inside out,” said Patrick Olsen, executive editor of CarFax, which tracks the damage to cars. Hurricane Harvey, which impacted the Houston area in late August 2017, is estimated to have been the most destructive in terms of severely affected or finished vehicles.
Cox Automotive estimates that up to 500,000 vehicles in Texas were lost to this storm, compared to 250,000 lost to Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and 200,000 to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Hurricane Harvey raised costs for the largest number of cars used across the territory by about 3% over the month following the hurricane, and costs remained high through November. CarFax estimates that at least 212,000 vehicles were lost in the storm.
And AIR Worldwide, which estimates the insurance industry’s losses from natural disasters, assumes that insurers will cover the losses of well over 250,000 vehicles over the course of Ida.
Anyone looking for cars in the coming months, even those away from the routes of this year’s hurricanes, should be careful: CarFax estimates that there are 370,000 storm-affected cars on the road today, commonly sold to unsuspecting consumers.
Hundreds of those cars were affected by previous storms, including Hurricane Katrina 16 years ago.
Don’t let your car be part of the statistics, the car price will always be an investment, insure it with Mark’s Insurance