Vehicle title branding

Vehicle title branding is the use of a permanent designation on a vehicle's title, registration or permit documents to indicate that a vehicle has been written off due to collision, fire or flood damage or has been sold for scrap.

The designation or brand is mandatory in most provinces and states in North America when an insurer or vehicle owner writes off a vehicle as a "total loss". Typically this means the cost to repair the vehicle would equal or exceed the car's value, although legal definitions vary.

The title branding programs typically have two objectives:

In North America, the vast majority of vehicle titles are issued by individual provinces/states and territories. Most have implemented some branding scheme to warn subsequent owners of a vehicle of severe damage to a vehicle due to collision, theft or disaster . The brands and the criteria used to assign them vary widely from one jurisdiction to another.

Typically, these include some variant of:

With the exception of 'salvage' (which may be replaced by the 'rebuilt' brand after repair and structural inspection, depending on the rules and regulations of the issuing district), the brands are permanent. Once a vehicle identification number has been associated with one of these brands, it will not be removed by authorities in that jurisdiction or in other jurisdictions with similar vehicle branding laws.

There is no consistent list of brands or of conditions under which they apply. What most US states call "junk" and most Canadian provinces call "irreparable" («irrécupérable») can be labelled "salvage" in some other jurisdiction - either because the criteria are different or because the same brand has been confusingly been given a different name. In Alberta only, "non repairable" is used to mean irreparable - in most other jurisdictions including Alberta, "salvage" means that the vehicle can indeed be repaired but that the cost of doing so is most likely prohibitive.

In North America, vehicle licenses are normally issued by individual provinces and states. Each operates under different regulations.

In some cases, the criteria to define a "total loss" vary - some base the cutoff amount on the nominal value of the vehicle in working condition, others look instead at the value of a working vehicle minus the value of a collision vehicle as scrap, salvage or parts. The percentage of the original value at which the "total loss" label is applied also varies.

These differences are sometimes exploited by schemes such as "title washing", in which a vehicle branded as 'junk' in one jurisdiction is registered in another, moving from state to state until one state with slightly different regulations brands the same vehicle as 'salvage' but repairable. A vehicle with Arizona registration and a 'salvage' title for salt water damage would, for instance, represent a red flag as a vehicle possibly once affected by environmental conditions and events elsewhere such as Hurricane Katrina. Vehicles with salt water or hurricane flood damage often have severe corrosion and electrical problems which cannot be properly repaired, so are best avoided.

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