Thousands of vehicles damaged in U.S. hurricanes last year are being shipped overseas and repaired.
Hurricane Harvey destroyed hundreds of thousands of vehicles in August last year and roughly six months on, insurance companies have finished assessing them and deemed many as total losses. The vehicles are generally then sold to auction firms who try to find buyers. As it turns out, many of these buyers are overseas, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“Once these insurance claims start to get processed and concluded, we start to see those cars getting exported,” head of trade and marketing for shipping company Maersk Line, Christian Pedersen said.
Many of these vehicles wrecked by Hurricane Harvey have been sold to wholesale car dealers and auto-parts salvagers in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The lower cost of labor in these parts of the world makes it much cheaper for the vehicles to be repaired. Even though the vehicle may be declared a total loss in the U.S., it could return to the road in another country
While most of these vehicles have titles which indicate if they’re salvaged, flood-damaged cars can easily end up back on the road without the proper paperwork.
Approximately 600,000 vehicles were left heavily damaged in the Houston area after Hurricane Harvey.