Want to see the inside of a Copart yard? There's a guy I follow on YouTube who buys and repairs cars purchased at Copart and then sells them. He does three 'walk arounds' each week and comments on the cars he finds.
What's interesting is that he ends up making very little on his repaired cars. But he's so fascinating as he repairs them in his suburban driveway that he's making $250,000 a year off YouTube. Talk about failing upward! The key is that he manages to be very entertaining doing it.
Part-out a car. The numbers actually looked pretty good. Not for the hours, but I would learn about every part of a car, outside-in while making money.
I think there’s a sweetspot for parting out though: probably 5 year old cars because they are worth repairing. May 6-8 year old cars for more luxury models.
Copart specializes in online auctions of cars that are too damaged for insurance companies to justify paying the price of repairing them; buyers include scrap yards and companies like LKQ Corp., which dismantles old cars and reconditions their parts to be sold in collision-repair shops. The insurance companies get what’s recovered in the auction, minus fees due to Copart that in some cases will increase proportionally with the value of a vehicle.
“There was a lot of concern that safety technology would reduce accidents and so there’d be less cars for auction -- good for society, bad for Copart,” said Craig Kennison, a senior research analyst at Baird. But that didn’t account for the spread of smartphones, he added. “Cars may be safer, but drivers are more distracted.”
A lot of that safety technology -- crumple zones, reinforced passenger cages, airbags, rear view cameras -- make things safer for people but contribute to increasing the dollar value of vehicle damage. I'd say that the concern was overstated, quite aside from a supposed increase in smartphone-induced accidents.
As we move to electric over the next few decades, I wonder what we're going to do with all the ICE vehicles that are on the road now? There's going to be a tipping point where finding a gasoline station will be hard. There are a lot of gas stations, so this is going to be pretty huge by itself. Some states may go as far as banning ICE vehicles all together.
I guess we already churn through a huge amount of cars yearly as it is... I don't see many 1979 Plymouths on the road. They must have been all chopped up at some point, so this is probably a non issue. That said, I can't imagine the transition will be without pain for lots of people...
Where the real estate is valuable, gas stations are already going dodo.
Production will slow and ICE will go where they still work well: vehicles that don’t move much, so the savings of E don’t make up their capitalized price.
And cold weather environments. Or where the grid is a recommendation rather than a dependency.
I have an old 1967 car that I like to drive a couple times a week so I wonder about this as well. I think the bans will start in the cities (they already have) but it will take a while before ICE vehicles are gone from the areas far from large cities.
It turns out that cars in general have serious downsides (at least in large quantities). I predict that the first bans of ICE cars will actually be bans of all cars in certain parts of cities.
Off topic but why does hn use the term ICE vehicle rather than gas vehicle? It comes across as forced like when a non tech person is trying to impress me with buzz words and I’m just like no one talks like that in the industry.
Coming from a country that refers to ‘gas’ as ‘petrol’, ‘gas vehicle’ sounds far more awkward than ‘ICE vehicle’ - makes me think of a car running on LPG
I don't get why the article is treating this as an exciting new business. It's as old as automobiles are -- every town has a junkyard or two that buys junked cars for a pittance. If you've had the displeasure of trying to keep a 15 year old junker running on a limited budget you may have even gone to one of these yards to source some parts.
What's the innovation here? He has an online platform? He may be really good at running his junkyards but the article does a terrible job accounting for his success.
>I don't get why the article is treating this as an exciting new business....What's the innovation here? He has an online platform? He may be really good at running his junkyards but the article does a terrible job accounting for his success.
I already responded to you in this thread with my anecdotal thoughts, but curiosity got the better of me so I took a look at their wikipedia page. Granted I don't have another point of reference, but it seems that the founder of Copoart was ahead of the curve in his field and saw the benefits of investing in technology/internet presence early in the game. Ebay was only around for 3 years by the time he introduced online auctions. So, maybe not innovative in the grand scheme of things, but certainly for his industry.
From wikipedia:
Willis Johnson began developing Copart's information technology in the 1990s. The first main step in this process was the creation of the Copart Auction System (CAS) in 1997, which was designed to unify and support the growing business as well as allow Copart facilities and sellers to access information, generate reports, and increase operating efficiencies. The next step came in 1998 with Copart's introduction of internet bidding—a departure from the industry standard of local physical auctions. As Internet bidding grew in popularity, Copart developed its online auction platform, VB2, which it implemented in 2003. VB2 technology opened the sales process to registered buyers (members) and sellers worldwide. In fiscal year 2004 in North America and fiscal year 2008 in the U.K., Copart discontinued all live auctions and began remarketing vehicles through VB2. Copart now sells more than one million vehicles each year through VB2 technology.
Individuals are not using copart to find parts in any significant number.
Copart is the defacto standard for most every mechanics shop and body shop in the country. When a car is being repaired, they can generally lookup available parts and prices using whatever software they use for generating quotes. They can choose from new oem parts, aftermarket parts, or salvage parts. The salvage parts will come from Copart's network.
In other words, when you get you gender bender repaired, there is a good chance that you insurance company is requiring that the shop try to use salvage parts first.
>When a car is being repaired, they can generally lookup available parts and prices using whatever software they use for generating quotes. They can choose from new oem parts, aftermarket parts, or salvage parts. The salvage parts will come from Copart's network.
You can call any junkyard and do the same from my experiance. Copart's advantage is a large inventory.
It's awesome that you're able to maintain your cars well enough to keep them going that long, but obviously yours are not even close to a normal use case. 200k miles or 12-15 years is average [1] longevity.
> It's awesome that you're able to maintain your cars well enough to keep them going that long,
I actually do very little. I'm pretty easy on my cars. A mechanic once told me he couldn't believe how little wear there was on the clutch for the miles. (I habitually approximate the right engine speed before letting the clutch out.)
Also, most car mechanical failures come from neglecting lubricating things.
>I don't get why the article is treating this as an exciting new business.....What's the innovation here? He has an online platform?
This would be a good question to ask someone who runs an automotive restoration/fabrication shop. From what I've seen they have a pretty great bidding system as far as online auctions go, but beyond that I'm just as uncertain as you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGGsYirSZhw
What's interesting is that he ends up making very little on his repaired cars. But he's so fascinating as he repairs them in his suburban driveway that he's making $250,000 a year off YouTube. Talk about failing upward! The key is that he manages to be very entertaining doing it.