Imagine for a minute that you’ve wrecked your car. Everyone is safe, but the car is a mess and the insurance company declares it a total loss, hands you a check and carts it off. Where does it go? What happens to it? You probably think it winds up in some junkyard someplace, and you may be right, but along the way it might stop in a place like the COPART yard, tucked away in the woods in Lyman, not too far from Route 111.

Here, secure behind high wooden walls topped with an electrical fence, row after row of all kinds of vehicles wait for their final destination, the next step in the cycle of their usefulness. Copart is a national company that specializes in auto salvage auctions. They are the guys who the insurance company pays to get rid of that car they hauled off for you, and recover whatever money they can in the process.

Every week thousands of cars are auctioned from Copart yards across the country. They maintain around 118 similar facilities nationwide and another in Canada. The Lyman yard is the only one in Maine, but there are others in New England, including two around Boston, one in Rhode Island and one in Connecticut. CEO Willis Johnson started the company in 1982, in Vallejo, California. He took it public in 1992 and today Copart is traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CPRT.

General Manager Richard Hulker

Copart’s Manager in Maine, Richard Hulker, explains that Copart doesn’t own any of the several hundred vehicles on their lot at any given time. They just take care of them, get them picked up, sold off, and shipped out.

When a car arrives in Lyman, the receiving agent at Copart notes what the damage might be. He photographs the car from several standard angles and documents what parts are damaged and which are still salvageable. The car is assigned a number, which is written on it and the information is entered into the company’s auction database. If the windows are broken, but interior pieces might be salvageable, Copart employees might seal the car with plastic against the elements. Then, using a loader with some impressive forklift tines, they’ll line it up with dozens of others inside the yard, waiting for the auction. At any given time, the folks at Copart can tell you exactly where in the yard that particular car is located.

Who buys these wrecks? Junkyards do. Rebuilders might put a new car together out of parts from other cars. Dismantlers will re-sell parts. Some of the cars might go to dealers. Some people are interested in specific models of cars. Hulker says one buyer he knows is only interested in Porsches. If a Porsche becomes available this man is very likely to bid on it. The parts on a hundred thousand dollar Porsche might fetch a pretty penny, particularly if the engine is intact. Predictably, cars that sell high used, like Toyotas and Volvos, sell high when damaged as well. Prices are dependant on make, model, age as well as the amount of damage and what parts may remain useable.

Before the Internet, these kinds of auctions were limited to people who could physically travel to the yard location, but today it has all moved online. Hulker says Copart’s Virtual Bid System sets the standard for the industry and opens up the auctions for more buyers, “In the old days back when they had the live auctions you might have a handful of people from the local area come here and view the vehicles and then bid on them that day, so the people who are out of state or the people who are in Mexico or Lithuania or Ukraine – they couldn’t bid on these vehicles.”

Prospective buyers online can see the condition of the vehicles from ten photographs taken by the receiving agent and the description of the condition on the web site. Local buyers can drop by the lot to inspect them in person before the auction, but fewer and fewer actually do. Many cars are shipped overseas, to places all over the globe, including the Far East and former Soviet Bloc countries.

While most of the cars have at least some damage, not all do. If a car is stolen, for example, and recovered undamaged after an insurance company has settled a claim, that car can be auctioned at Copart. “Basically if a claim has been paid out on it, and the insurer has settled with the owner, then they’ve got to do something with the vehicle, and that’s where we come in.” says Hulker. Copart often has vintage vehicles for sale. Sometimes the company will auction donated cars for charities.

Different states have different regulations, but in Maine all of Copart’s auctions are open to public bidders, but only for cars at the Maine site and provided the buyers reside in Maine. If you fill out the application and pay the fee, you could bid too, but it’s not a process really designed for individuals who aren’t in the industry, and only a few ever do. “Your average guy who is looking for a used car isn’t going to come in here.”

Sometimes people leave things in cars. Those things are generally inventoried by the receiving agent and are sold off with the car, says Hulker. “When we inventory the car we don’t remove anything from the car. It stays exactly the way we get it. That’s why we take the pictures immediately.” Because these often are cars that have been damaged in an accident, sometimes people have been injured in them. If there is biological material in a car, like blood, the car is sealed and marked as a “Bio” car. The fact is noted in the auction information and when the car is sold it becomes the buyer’s responsibility. Hulker emphasizes that his employees don’t get near anything like that, “For safety reasons, our guys don’t get into them.”

Looking at rows and rows of wrecked cars inspires a renewed commitment to wearing your seatbelt. The company sometimes will work with driver education programs to provide cars for demonstrations.

On this sunny summer day, the Copart yard is the temporary home for about 300 cars, about a hundred of which were in this week’s auction. During the winter, when bad weather leads to more accidents, that number can more than triple. At one point last winter the Lyman yard hosted over a thousand vehicles. Copart will also auction motorcycles and snowmobiles.

Copart provides one of those crucial services that most of us don’t think much about. Hulker says, “We can do literally hundreds of auctions a day, that are seen all over the world. We’re absolutely the best at what we do, hands down” They do it quietly, just out of site, off a rural road in Lyman.

by Chad Gilley aroundmaine.com July, 27, 2005

Copart Web Site