With the damage to the Santorin car being sufficient that my insurance company decided to total the car I was on the lookout for a replacement. I was hoping to find a Santorin 6-speed so that following the transfer of components to the replacement car I would be back to where I was before the damage occurred. It didn’t take too long to realize that finding a base S4 similar to mine would be exceptionally difficult. I had specifically ordered my S4 without a sunroof and some other comfort options. A Santorin 6-speed without a sunroof is probably a very rare car.
I opted to consider other colors with Silver being the first choice and other colors a possibility so long as the car could be purchased for a low enough price to make repainting the car a different color feasible.
I also left open the possibility of purchasing a Tiptronic (Automatic transmission) so long as the purchase price was low enough to allow me to fund a 6-speed swap into the car.
I was put in touch with an auto dealer who frequented auto insurance auctions and gave them the specifics of what I was looking for and what the maximum price was that I would pay for a car. After a couple of weeks they sent me some information about a Silver S4 in Connecticut that was a theft recovery and would be going up for auction soon.
The fact that it only had 43,000 miles on it, was a single owner vehicle, and appeared to have minimal damage made it an appealing car. I could live with the Silver color, but the tiptronic would need to go. I wasn’t enthusiastic about bidding on a tiptronic so when it first went up for auction I passed on participating.
At the conclusion of the auction the highest bidder had offered $1600. At that point I was kicking myself for not getting into the auction. I’d been willing to spend up to $5,000 on one of these cars and whoever the high bidder was had just got themselves a great deal.
I went back to the auction site the following day to see if any new cars had come available and I saw that this Silver car was scheduled to go back up for auction. A bit puzzled about this I contacted the auto dealer to inquire what was going on. They informed me that the insurance companies have the option of accepting the high bid, or not and re-listing the car in the hopes of getting a higher price. Now I was interested in this car since I’d figured about $2,000 would be needed to do the 6-speed swap, and if I could purchase this car for around $2,500 I’d be near my maximum for acquiring a replacement vehicle.
A week later the car went back up for auction and the dealer entered the auction on my behalf with a maximum offer of $2,500. This time the bid price went up to $1700 and then stopped. I was a wondering if I had been the high bidder when I received a phone call from the dealer telling me that I was the high bidder, but that the insurance company still had the right to refuse the offer and try to list the car again the following week. I was told that they would hear from the insurance company some time during the day as to whether or not the offer was accepted.
About an hour later I heard from the dealer again letting me know that the insurance company had accepted my $1700 offer for the car. Now I just needed to figure out how to get the car.