Internet Spawns a Demolition Derby With a Wrinkle

Foreign-based online bidders such as Lara now buy as many as one-quarter of the wrecks at Washington area auctions. It is the inexpensive labor overseas -- foreign bidders can pay to fix a car hat is declared too expensive to fix in the United States -- that helps fuel all of this. Last year, 19 times more salvaged vehicles headed out of U.S. ports than three years before, according to PIERS, a New Jersey-based import/export data tracking service.

Such sweeping forces of trade and technology bear down daily on Moore, a third-generation salvage man who remembers running around the family's Prince George's County operation as a 10-year-old, looking inside trunks for odd things and fishing in a nearby creek. Recently divorced, he spends his spare time riding a Harley and tending flowers and bird feeders around his home in Southern Maryland.

Even pre-Internet, running a salvage yard was more than Sanford & Son. At Moore's King George operation, workers who pull parts off the newly arrived wrecks log the parts into computers. Then they use a forklift to carry gutted wrecks to the back yard, where the hulks wait to supply more parts as needed. Eventually, after the wreck has exhausted its usefulness, it is fed into a giant outdoor crusher, with the resulting flattened, rectangular cube sold to metal recyclers. Because the wrecks can sit for up to three years, Moore aims to buy vehicles that will yield three times what he paid for them -- to make a profit.

But with online bidding, Moore suddenly must square off against quick-moving competitors such as Algirdas Griusys, 46, of Gargzdai, Lithuania.

He is one of more than 100 estimated salvage importers in his country, working from a home office with a full-time assistant. They buy 50 to 55 U.S. wrecks a month, bidding at an array of auction lots in the United States. He rebuilds them and also resells them as is. "That way, I can move more cars."

Griusys keeps a few of the rebuilt vehicles himself, such as the 2000 Honda CRV that crashed in Elkridge in August.

The Lithuanian said he has had trouble recently finding deals in Waldorf. "Too many foreign buyers," he said over the phone. Griusys adjusts, and on the same Tuesday that Moore and Lara square off over the minivan -- after trying at Waldorf -- he clicks his way over to auctions in other cities, picking up eight cars by day's end.

Compared with Griusys and Lara, who are likelier to sniff out more online deals at other Washington auctions, Moore spends less time on the Internet, doing much of his bidding by instinct. He also prefers being a jack-of-all-trades at his salvage yard.

"On a day like today," he said this week, citing perfect afternoon weather, "I might go out and crush cars."

In one way, the Washington area remains a good place to be a salvage dealer: Lots of people wreck lots of nice cars. In 2005, more than 30,000 area vehicles were declared a total loss as a result of accidents, according to records kept by the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

Nor is global trade all bad for local salvage yards. Growing economies in Asia, for instance, have helped push up the price of recycled metal. Moore now gets more than $100 for a crushed car.

Insurance Auto Auctions Inc., based in Illinois, owns wreck auction lots in Brandywine, Laurel and Fredericksburg. All told, the company said, it has bidders in more than 60 countries who have helped push prices at the auctions up by an average of more than $300 per unit compared with two years ago. California-based Copart Inc. owns the auction lot in Waldorf. The company said in its most recent quarter, it saw a record average selling price.