Copart auction archive – how to use data wisely on VinCrash

If you’ve ever found yourself sitting late at night over Copart auctions, you know what it’s like:
dozens of tabs in your browser, notes on a piece of paper, a calculator on your phone and that constant question in your head -.
“is this a good price or am I exaggerating already?”.

VinCrash doesn’t promise golden mountains. It is simply
a well-designed archive of Copart and IAAI auctions,
where you can calmly browse through what has already sold in the past, how much it cost and what it looked like.
Sounds ordinary – and that’s exactly the point.

Copart – a world in which it is easy to get lost

Copart is a great tool in itself. Thousands of cars, different states, different budgets.
But from the perspective of someone who doesn’t live it every day, there’s a lot going on there all at once:

• one car runs out in three minutes,
• another one has just been outbid by $25,
• a third you’re looking at for the fifth time and still not sure if it’s too expensive.

Then there’s the classic problem: no point of reference.
You know that a particular model “costs more or less”, but it’s hard to tell,
whether a particular unit with a given damage and equipment is priced sensibly.

And this is where the need for something simple comes in:
access to completed auctions in one place,
without scrolling through half the internet.

Why do you need an auction archive when it’s the ‘here and now’ that counts?

At first glance, you might think: ‘why do I need an archive, what’s important is what’s on auction today’.
But today’s prices don’t come out of nowhere. They are the result of how the market has behaved before.

Looking through the archive auctions on VinCrash:

• you can see how much similar cars actually sold for,
• you can compare the types of damage and equipment with what you are looking at now,
• you get a feel for where the bargain ends and overpaying begins.

After a few days of this kind of viewing, you start to have a fairly definite picture in your head:
“an SUV in petrol with this kind of mileage and this kind of damage usually ends up somewhere in this range”.
And suddenly bidding stops being a lottery.

What exactly does VinCrash show?

On vincrash.com you won’t find marketing fireworks.
It is raw, factual and one step at a time. For completed auctions you will see, among other things:

• basic car data (make, model, year, version, fuel, transmission),
• photos from the day of the auction,
• a description of the damage from the auction,
• mileage information (if provided),
• the final price of the auction.

You don’t have to transcribe all this into Excel, combine it with printscreens and compare it manually.
It is laid out in such a way that it can be used in a normal way – whether you are a trader or just want to download a car once in a while.
you just want to download a car for yourself once in a while.

How to use VinCrash in practice (without much philosophy)

Imagine you are hunting for a particular car – say, a compact SUV from the last 5-7 years,
petrol, automatic. Rather than going into a bidding war “on feel”:

1. You go to vincrash.com.
2. you look for the specific vintages and versions you are interested in,
3. you browse through several completed auctions – pay attention to price, description of damage, mileage,
4. after an hour of such “browsing” you have a pretty realistic price range in your head.

When you later come across a similar car in a live auction, it is much easier to say to yourself:
“OK, up to this amount I bid, above this amount I just let it go”.

And that’s the whole ‘magic’ – no tricks, just structured data.

Some typical uses of an auction archive

For someone who imports cars professionally

You can treat VinCrash as your back office for price analysis.
Instead of relying solely on intuition, you have real auction results at your fingertips – a great thing when planning a
purchase for a specific customer budget.

For someone pulling a car for the first time

Instead of starting by thinking: “surely everyone wants to rip me off”, you can start by taking a cool look:
how much such cars actually go for at auctions. This will put you at ease and help you to make a calm decision.

For someone who just likes to “rummage through the data”

There are some people who can spend an evening analysing football statistics.
If you are this type of person, the auction archive will be for you a simply
an interesting source of data about the US car market.

Summary

Copart auctions can be exciting, but emotions don’t always go hand in hand with good decisions.
Access to the archive of completed auctions means that instead of guessing, you can simply see
how the market has behaved so far.

VinCrash does not sell ‘miracle solutions’. It gives something much more down-to-earth –
structured data on cars and auctions that helps you bid with your head, not on the spur of the moment.
The rest – as always – is up to you and where you put your boundary:
“up to this amount I fight, above I let it go”.