Does ocean water flooding your car total it?

The title says it all. Any experience? Asking for a friend up here living near the coast in Ma during Thursday’s storm.

Yes anything above floor level. 

IMO, salt water is seriously bad news.  If you can't tear the interior apart, flush everything out, flush out behind / inside every body panel, etc. to get the salt out within hours after the car comes out of the water, it's scrap.  It'll rust to bits at some point and all the wiring will be trashed. 

Electricity and salt water are a bad combination, and the problems can continue to show up for a long time.

If it's an irreplaceable classic, keep it.  If it's just a car, send it to the insurance company.

Yeah it plays hell on the wiring in several insidious ways. The water wicks far up into the wiring under the insulation - think feet. Even if it eventually evaporates, it leaves the salt, which is like acid on wiring. Perhaps even worse, the wires don't fail immediately, so after the car's drained and the engine water blown out, it may actually start, but it's doomed to start having terrible electrical gremlins within weeks or months. Actually, if saltwater got inside the ECU, I'd be surprised it would even start - saltwater is very conductive and "provides" partial shorts between anything it touches. I say stay away.

That said, anything non-electrical might be okay, depending how long it was submerged, but even an engine that's rescued after a couple days will very likely have rust on the cylinder walls and at least need to be torn down and inspected.

It's arguably worse than fire to anything electrical, and of course it accelerates corrosion as well.

That thing is done for. If insurance won't cover, dump it with a quickness. 

Totalling a car is completely up to the way its handled.  If the owner went out after the flooding and dried it out, it has a clean title.  If they take it to a shop, file an insurance claim, and the insurance company determines that the repairs will cost greater than about 80% of the value of the car, they total it.

So its a numbers game.  If you have $4000 worth of repair to a $5000 Ford, its totalled.  If you have the same $4000 flood damage in a $100k Bentley, its not totalled.  If it was fixed with a box fan and a screwdriver, no one ever knows.

Yes

It should.  My old boss bought an F350 that rolled off a boat ramp.  From the short time it was submerged it became an electrical nightmare. Sections of the wiring harness was turning to green powder.

I grew up within earshot of the atlantic ocean, even if a car was never submerged in the briny deep, salt water still destroys it. It's an insidious and incredibly slow and patient car killer. Every time you fix one issue, another will pop up as parts slowly dissolve into some form of oxide.

Stick a fork in it, cuz it's done!

mad_machine said:

I grew up within earshot of the atlantic ocean, even if a car was never submerged in the briny deep, salt water still destroys it. It's an insidious and incredibly slow and patient car killer. Every time you fix one issue, another will pop up as parts slowly dissolve into some form of oxide.

Live near the Gulf of Mexico and also Mobile Bay and agree just the salt air wreaks havoc with cars and  houses and anything else it touches. Have seen cars stored  by absentee beach house owners that never get washed or used much and they are almost as bad as cars subjected to northern road salt.

in Illinois, if water damage is over 33% of its value, then by law it is totaled.  doesn't matter what type of water damage.  Even hydrolocking a motor.