Using Photos of Your Car Broken Down or Crashed Is the Funniest Way to Sell a Car

If you're like us, you spend much of the day scavenging Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist for your next project car buy. Even if you're not, erm, actively on the hunt for a new beater. If that's the case, in your endless searches, you've probably come across the occasional, seemingly totally carefree listing that shows the vehicle for sale in a total state of disarray. Let's give some props to those sellers.

As a brief aside, let me clarify that I am talking about using your own photos of your own car wrecked in a ditch. I'm not talking about anything grisly, I'm not talking about anything where someone got hurt (or worse). I'm talking about honesty; you wrecked or broke down, and you're giving the future buyer the full story.

I was reminded of this brutally honest sales tactic today when I came across this Facebook Marketplace listing for a BMW E46 M3 coupe in the Denver, Colorado area. The posting is simple.

"The car was crashed from hydro planing," seller Devin Hanson writes. "We have all the replacement components. Looking for trades or offers. Interested in s4’s,335i,wrx."

And, of course, photos of the smashed-up M3 accompanied that description. The pics in the listing show the M3 laying over a bed of ornamental roadside rocks and a high curb, with its right-rear wheel freshly smashed off the axle and control arms. In the video included in the listing, you can even see tire marks that tell the M3's unfortunate crash story.