Prove my car’s worth nothing — so they did (twelve PDFs included)

Insurance companies have one objective function: minimize payout. You have a different objective function: maximize whatever slack is left in your old, dented sedan. The logical move is simple: change the constraint. Ask the insurer to prove, in painstaking detail, that your car is actually worth nothing. They will, because their optimal response to an extra work cost is to demonstrate their lowball with the enthusiasm of someone filing expense reports for office succulents.

Call it the Burden‑of‑Proof Gambit. The Reddit chorus is right: “Insurance companies are 100% about paying out as little as possible” and “Never accept their first price.” So the claimant asks, nicely and precisely, “Please provide documentation showing how you calculated the market value.” That request converts an armchair assertion (“it’s worth almost nothing”) into a deliverable: comparable listings, depreciation schedules, valuation guides, condition adjustments, and photographs — all the receipts. (As one comment put it: handle bureaucracy “calmly, firmly, and armed with receipts.”) The adjuster, who prefers spreadsheets to litigation, obliges. You now have a contractually produced audit trail that either justifies the low number or reveals a leverage point.

Endgame: you either accept the tidy, defended number (efficient, in a ‘for certain values of efficient’ way) or you use their own work to negotiate more. The trick isn’t legal pyrotechnics; it’s informational arbitrage — make them do the math, then point out the rounding they “forgot.” That’s not malice; it’s the polite application of incentives. Send the email; wait for the attachments; enjoy the tiny, satisfying embarrassment of an insurer proving your car is worth less than the cost of their paperwork.