Americans junk roughly 12 million cars each year, although that number can fluctuate by a few million from year to year. These vehicles are often recycled into raw materials.
Other cars, known as scrap cars, are taken apart so that their parts can be used to fix other cars. Both are great ways to get rid of a car that no longer works.
It’s one thing to talk about selling a junk car, but entirely another to actually sell it. We’ll talk about how to sell a junk car in this article, and even offer some advice to make a junk car sale go smoothly.
1. GET YOUR DOCUMENTS HANDY
The first step in selling any car, junk or not, is to have all the paperwork with you. The most important document to have with you is the vehicle title.
A vehicle’s title is issued by the DMV and serves as proof of ownership. Without the title, you can’t legally sell the vehicle because you can’t officially transfer ownership.
For most sales, you would also need a vehicle registration, but you don’t need one for junk car sales. Registration proves that the vehicle is street legal, but that’s not relevant in this case since nobody’s going to drive it again.
2. CONTACT SCRAP YARDS
The biggest customers for junk cars are scrap yards, so they’re the first place you should look if you want to sell your junk car. It’s best to look into multiple scrapyards if you can, because while most scrap yards will buy any junk car, they won’t all offer the same price for it.
However, there is a caveat to this, because while scrap yards won’t value junk cars the same, they do measure their worth in the same way. This brings us to our next point.
3. UNDERSTAND HOW CARS ARE VALUED
Junk car sales are very different from other types of car sales, mainly because the price isn’t measured by the same standards. When buying a car for personal use, the price will fluctuate based on how new the car is, the shape that it’s in, and what kind of added features it comes with.
Junk car sales are measured by weight. Since the car is no longer running, the make, model, and function don’t matter. What matters is how much raw material the car has in it, and the best way to find that is to simply weigh the car.
HOW TO SELL A JUNK CAR
Junking a car isn’t a subject that comes up much, so many people don’t know how to sell a junk car. We’ve hopefully taken out some of the guesswork involved in the paragraphs above.
Still, there’s only so much about a junk car sale that will fit in one article, so there’s always more to learn. If you want to know more about junk cars and how the business of selling them works please visit our site.
If you have a junk car in the Dallas area and you’re looking for a place to scrap it, feel free to contact us.