Hundreds of thousands of damaged cars written off as total losses following hurricanes that hit the U.S. last year are finding new life overseas.

The automobiles were caught up in floods as Hurricane Harvey pushed heavy rains and floodwater across a wide swath of the U.S. Gulf Coast in late August 2017, leaving many vehicles damaged but largely intact. Insurance companies have declared many thousands of them as total losses, leaving some to be sold for scrap and others to enter distribution channels for repair and delivery to wholesale car dealers and auto-parts salvagers as far away as Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

These are the opening two paragraphs of Erica E. Phillips, “Hurricane-Damaged Cars Moving Again as U.S. Exports,” Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2018. (gated)

I know what many of you are thinking because it’s the first thought that occurred to me: is this a scam to pass off badly damaged cars to unknowing buyers?

There’s some good news here:

Mr. Widmer said flood-damaged vehicles generally indicate on their title that they were salvaged.

And some bad news mixed in with good news:

Still, some uninsured cars end up in the secondary market without the proper paperwork. “There are telltale signs of water damage,” he said. “First of all the smell, that’s a big one.”

But why does this arbitrage make sense? Two reasons:

Often it costs less to repair vehicles in regions where labor is less expensive, so a car declared a total loss in the U.S. could end up back on the road. In the U.S., a car deemed as salvage can’t be sold, registered or driven unless it is fully repaired and the owner obtains a new title.

So labor is cheaper elsewhere and regulations in the United States require it to be fully repaired rather than what a low-income buyer might want.

What would be great is if these cars were allowed to be sold in Cuba. A musty 2016 Buick probably beats a 1954 Chevrolet.