SAVAGE, Minn. — Chris Bracke has been in the car business all his life.
He's the sales manager at Highway 101 Auto Salvage in Savage, and he's never seen so much demand for parts.
“It’s been an unbelievable surge in demand,” Bracke says.
A demand that started more than a year ago when the pandemic first hit.
“Part of it was the stimulus money and part of it was people being off of work. They were looking for ways to make money and ways to stay busy,” Bracke says.
"It's been a huge increase in that do-it-yourself person."
On top of that, Bracke says the ongoing chip shortage has brought in a lot of customers in recent months.
“People are just trying to put things back to together to get cars back on the road,” Bracke says.
“There are lot of parts that people can’t find and this is the only avenue for them.”
And it's not just parts, Bracke says they're also seeing a huge demand for whole cars and trucks.
He says most of these cars were scheduled to be scrapped and many required thousands of dollars in parts and labor to get them running again.
"We’re seeing a lot of offers from oddly enough different countries, particularly Africa. We’re seeing Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia, and they're exporting cars,” Bracke says.
Because they can't find enough new ones in their own country.
"Not only are they taking these cars and putting them in a container and shipping them all the way back to wherever they're shipping it, they're actually cutting them up into three to five pieces and they’re putting them back together at their destination."
Bracke says the reason they’re cutting the cars into several pieces if because you pay less in taxes and fees to ship parts of cars versus the whole thing.
“I guess they can make it work financially because they can find cheaper labor to put the cars back together,” Bracke says.
So, long story short, if you have an old car laying around that you’re not using, you'll probably get more money for it than you might expect.