Would you still drive after this accident damage?

Confused. When our Subie was rear ended and totaled the insurance company took the car and sent us a check. How do you still have the car?

Be really careful with the insurance company. The price of used cars has gone way up lately and there will be a strong incentive for them to use an out of date KBB or similar "value" for your vehicle. For the same reason, the amount of damage which would total a car 2 years ago may not total it today. Perhaps before you settle with the insurance company you might want to get a repair quote from a shop or two?

It does not look like your car is in very bad shape. It needs a new hatch, bumper and bumper cover, maybe a new tail light (depending why it fell out like that), and perhaps some pounding out of metal in the back. Other than that it seems to be in pretty good shape. A photo underneath might help us comprehend the full extent of the damage, from the one external shot I would not have expected to have seen the problem near the battery. For comparison, when the insurance company totaled our Subie wagon the whole back end was bent downward starting at the roof over the back axle and the body work was jammed into both rear tires (it was rear ended while stopped to turn left by a similar sized car going around 30 mph). I was in a junkyard yesterday with my son and the guys in front of us were from a shop (in full shop uniforms!) and they were buying parts to fix what looked like a mid 2000 Toyota which must have had far more damage than your car suffered, as they had in their cart everything from the radiator forward plus a hood and some large piece of metal framework from underneath.

 

Looks like a body shop could use a frame bender and fix that car up to look pretty good. In terms of continuing to drive it, you need to make sure all the electronics in that back corner aren't damaged and aren't being squeezed in a way that bumps in the road could cause further damage.

 

good deal. might be worth just driving it. make sure you look around before selling, cars are hard to come by these days, and prices are way up

 

If you can get a price on just the frame bending part of the job the rest of the work can be done with basic tools most people have in their tool box. And before you take it in remove the bumper cover. If its a slow day and you did all the prep work for them they might be able to do it in a 1/2 hour for you.

 

If the damage does not affect the rear suspension at all I would be tempted to fix it, since it should not be much of a safety issue then. If you can get the bent body pieces pulled back to roughly their original position for a reasonable amount, and the electronics are not squished, the rest of the parts shouldn't run too much at a junkyard.

But first check out the insurance situation in your state. The "rebuilt" title car could probably still get liability insurance but the insurer could charge more for it than what you paid before. Other forms of coverage probably will not be available since the insurance company won't want to figure out what was preexisting damage. Maybe you could get some strange thing like "coverage from the back doors forward", which wouldn't help you if you get hit from behind again, but would cover other accidents?

One more point, could you really buy an identical car for $4300 today? That seems a bit low given the inflation in used car prices.