Damage tiers

TL;DR: Every lot's damage label gets a severity band — Light, Moderate, or Heavy — and the combination of damage type + severity discounts the car's market value. The discount also implies a repair cost. When that implied repair gets too large relative to what the car can resell for, the verdict drops to Parts Only automatically.

How damage enters the math

Two inputs:

Damage type — what's wrong. Pulled from the auction listing (Front End, Side, Hail, Water/Flood, etc.) and editable in the panel.
Severity — how bad it is. Defaults to Moderate; you set Light or Heavy from the photos.

Each (type, severity) pair maps to a discount applied to the car's market value. Two things fall out of that one number:

Damaged value — what the car is worth as it sits.
Implied repair — the gap between the undamaged value and the damaged value. If a moderate front-end hit takes a quarter of the value off the car, the math treats that quarter as roughly what it costs to put back.

The discounts are calibrated against real salvage-auction outcomes, not body-shop rate books — the same philosophy as the rest of the verdict math.

The damage types, ranked

From least to most value-destructive at the same severity:

Damage type	Character
Normal Wear	Barely moves the number. A used car being a used car.
Minor Dent / Scratches	Cosmetic. Mostly detail-shop work.
Hail	Wide but shallow. PDR territory unless panels are creased.
Rear End	Usually bolt-on parts, less likely to reach the firewall or drivetrain.
Front End	The most common label at auction. Radiator support, airbags, and sensors drive the spread between Light and Heavy.
Mechanical	No body damage to photograph — which is exactly why severity matters so much here.
Side	Structural risk: B-pillars and rockers are expensive to pull straight.
Undercarriage	Hidden damage. Frame and suspension work that photos understate.
Vandalism	Ranges from a keyed panel to stripped interior + cut harnesses.
Rollover	Roof structure. Even Light rollover means glass everywhere and airbag deployment.
All Over	Multiple impact zones. Treat as the sum of its parts.
Water / Flood	Progressive damage — electrics keep failing after purchase. Heaviest standard discount.
Total Burn	At Heavy severity, the value left is essentially the parts that didn't melt.

Directional variants from the listing ("Left Side", "Front Right", "Rear Left") fold into the matching base type automatically, so you don't need to re-pick from the dropdown just because Copart phrased it differently.

Severity: Light / Moderate / Heavy

The same damage type spans a wide range — a Light front-end hit on a truck might be a bumper cover; a Heavy one is a structural rebuild. Severity is the lever that captures that:

Light — cosmetic or single-panel. The car is close to drivable-and-sellable as-is.
Moderate — the default when we can't tell from the listing. Real repair work, but the car is clearly a rebuild candidate.
Heavy — structural, multi-zone, or deployment-level damage. The discount widens fast, and Parts Only territory gets close.

Severity is yours to judge from the photos. If the listing's label says Front End but the photos show the radiator support folded, set Heavy and let the math catch up to what you can see.

The repair-to-value rule

The implied repair feeds the Parts Only check: when reconditioning gets too expensive relative to the car's adjusted resale value, the verdict stops pretending the rebuild pencils and tells you the value is in components.

This is why a Heavy Water/Flood or Total Burn lot almost always reads Parts Only regardless of how cheap the bid is — the discount at that tier leaves too little resale headroom to absorb the work.

For the full rule, see How the verdict works.

Overriding

Everything here is editable per lot:

Damage type — change the dropdown if the listing's label undersells what the photos show (a "Minor Dent" with a wavy roofline is not a minor dent).
Severity — Light / Moderate / Heavy from your read of the photos.
Recon estimate — if you have a real number (your shop, your parts source), enter it directly and it replaces the implied figure in the profit math.

Anything you override gets a yellow highlight so you don't confuse your number with the auto-pulled one.