KOCHI: A car showroom in Thrissur is scrapping 357 flood-hit brand new cars after the insurance company wrote them off as ‘total loss’. Further, the insurance surveyors are evaluating damage to 147 used cars and 110 customer vehicles at BRD Car World , a dealer of Maruti cars.“These brand new cars were fully submerged and they belong to the ‘C’ category of damage as water rose to the dashboard level. These are valued as ‘total loss’ by United Insurance Co. Ltd, the insurers, and buyers from Pune, Jaipur and Ahmedabad are negotiating on prices. The original market value of these 357 new vehicles, including GST, is Rs 28.75 crore,” a source in the know of the things said. “The showroom had originally stocked around 500 new cars but as the water level rose, it managed to move some of them to safer areas.”A BRD Car World official confirmed that the vehicles were affected. “The details of these flood affected cars will be blocked in the dealership management system (DMS) of the company, forbidding anybody to pass them off as brand new vehicles. These cars won’t reappear in any of our showrooms,” he said.Kerala Automobile Dealers Association (KADA) secretary Manoj Kurup also said the flooded vehicles would not reappear in showrooms. “The flooded vehicles do not fall in the insurance clauses and no dealer will sell them,” he said. Industry sources said nearly 1,000 brand new cars and 7,000-8,000 customer cars of various automobile companies were damaged across Kerala in the recent floods.

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