Auto lemons from Mississippi floodwaters

Hurricane Katrina put thousands of people out of work and their homes. It also damaged an untold number of cars. Here’s how to make sure you don’t accidentally buy a flood damaged lemon.

More below.

Lemon laws don’t help you if you buy from a disaster area

Hurricane Katrina recently devastated the Gulf Coast region, leaving thousands of people without homes, jobs or food. Many of these people also lost their automobiles to flooding. Some cars had only minor damage; others were completely covered in New Orleans, where the waters were as deep as 22 feet in some parts of town.

Obviously, if your car has been sitting in twenty feet of water, you’re not going to just turn the key and drive away. Estimates of damaged cars run in the range of a half a million and it’s likely that some of these will be sold to unsuspecting buyers.

What can you do to avoid buying a water damaged vehicle?

One option is to check with Carfax, a company that will run a check on the cars vehicle identification number, or VIN. They can tell you if the car has been damaged or totaled as a result of flood damage. Some insurance companies are actually destroying or selling for scrap any cars they have paid off as a result of flood damage. This will prevent a number of such vehicles from reaching the secondary market.

Water damage can manifest itself in a number of ways. The obvious ones are rust and damaged carpet, but carpet can easily be replaced. You should be suspicious of an older car that appears to have new carpet. Other problems are not so easily noticed, such as damage to electronics in the dashboard or damage to the transmission or engine as a result of rising water. The Katrina floods were salt water; that makes the damage all the more severe as salt water is corrosive.

Your best option is to take the car to a qualified mechanic and ask them specifically to look for flood damage. It’s possible that some damage might elude even a mechanic’s eyes if he or she isn’t looking for it. 

While you should check with Carfax for a VIN check, be aware that it is possible, due to quirks in the laws of various states, to “wash” a car title so that no mention of previously noted damage shows up. We hope that a universal database of car title information will eventually be created that is more or less tamperproof, but in the meantime, all buyers of used vehicles are at risk.

Keep in mind, too, that used cars do not qualify under the Lemon Law statutes of most states, so if you purchase a car that has been damaged by flooding from the Gulf Coast or elsewhere, you will have no legal recourse against the manufacturer. You will have legal recourse against the person who sold it to you, provided that you can demonstrate that they did so in bad faith. That may be hard to prove, however.

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