Vehicle buckets

TL;DR: A salvage Lexus and a salvage Toyota don’t lose value the same way. Buckets are how AuctionMate handles that — five depreciation classes that adjust title-brand discounts based on the vehicle’s parts ecosystem and resale demographic.

The five buckets

Bucket	Vibe	Examples
A	Work / utility — high parts availability, broad mechanic familiarity, depreciation curve close to flat	Ford F-150, Ram 1500, Toyota Tacoma, work vans, Rivian R1T
B	Mainstream — the default for most cars on the road	Toyota Camry, Honda Civic, Honda Accord, Nissan Altima, Hyundai Sonata
B+	Accessible luxury — premium brand, mainstream parts ecosystem	Lexus RX, Acura MDX, Audi Q5, mainstream Mercedes
C	European luxury — premium parts cost, narrower mechanic pool	BMW 7-Series, Mercedes S-Class, Audi A8
D	Exotic — collector market, parts scarcity drives extreme depreciation when titles are branded	Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren

If a make/model isn’t recognized, the math defaults to B (mainstream).

Why buckets exist

When you flat-multiplier-discount a salvage title — say, "every salvage car loses 45% of clean retail" — you understate the cost of repairing a C-bucket BMW (where every replacement headlight is $1,400) and overstate the cost of repairing an A-bucket F-150 (where the entire bumper assembly is $200 from a wrecking yard).

The result of a flat multiplier:

Underbids on A-bucket trucks (you walk away from money on the table)
Overbids on C-bucket luxury (you discover the recon math after you’ve already paid)

Buckets fix this by adjusting the title-brand discount per class. A salvage A-bucket truck loses less of its value than a salvage C-bucket sedan — which matches what actually happens when you put them through a rebuild and resell them.

Where buckets affect the math

Buckets modify the title-brand multiplier when the title is anything other than Clean. They affect:

Adjusted retail — what the car can realistically resell for
The verdict — BUY / CONSIDER / PASS / PARTS depend on margin, which depends on adjusted retail
The PARTS threshold — the recon-to-value rule fires earlier on C-bucket and D-bucket cars because their reconditioning is more expensive

Buckets do not affect:

The verdict math for Clean-title cars (no title discount applied)
Your buyer fee (set by the auction’s tier table)
Shipping (set by zone)

Overrides

For most cars, the auto-detected bucket is what you want. Two cases where you might override:

Niche / collector cars. A 25-year-old Nissan Skyline GT-R isn’t a B-bucket Sentra — its parts demographics are closer to D-bucket exotic. Override the bucket per lot.
Dealer-tier custom buckets. If you have a market-specific edge — say, you only buy theft-recovery Toyotas in Texas and you know the comps better than our default — the Dealer tier lets you override bucket multipliers globally for your account.

Pro and Free tiers can override buckets per-lot. Dealer tier can override globally.

Calibration

The bucket multipliers started as informed estimates from auction outcomes. As more comps accumulate in the system, the multipliers refine over time. Public defaults change at most once per quarter and are announced in the changelog.