This sounds fishy as well. Not sure how another company can make the total claim and request the title. Their whole point is to simply cut the check. Yes, when a vehichle is damaged and an estimate of repair is generated, the insurance company will compare the cost of repair vs. the value of the vehicle. If the repairs are 80% of the cost ot the vehicle, the insurance company will want to total the vehicle. Lets say, the value of your vehicle is 10,000 and the damages are 8,000. The company will want to total. They should offer to cut you a check for 8,000 and take the vehicle. However, they should offer to sell you the vehicle back for lets say 2,000. You can keep the car with a salvage title and have 6000 in your pocket. If you can get the vehicle repaired for less than 6k, your money ahead but will have a car that is worth less with the salvage title = track car!! Not bad if you have a beater and hope to keep it to salvage. Yes, there is often damage internally that an adjuster cannot see and is only found once the repairs start. At least that is the process I went through twice but in both instances, I did the damage to myself and was running the process through my insurance. Yes, it is tempting to just buy the min. amount of insurance and let someone else deal with it; however, someone is going to go out and get a lawyer and come after your cheap ass. In my previous post, remember that 5,000,000 bus accident? Well, lets up it a bit. Say you hit that bus and actuall killed two kids that spent a month on life support and several had to be medivacced. Now, instead of 5,000,000 - your negligence now had a quantifiable amount of $500,000,000. Under either scenario, someone at somepoint is going to come back trying to recoup costs. You will be hauled into court, lose and every single thing you own will be sold at auction and a garnishment will be put on you for the rest of your life. In the end, insurance companies will lose in this extreme but not unrealistic scenario. Point is, you should carry enough insurance to protect your and yours for the 80% of situations we find ourselves in. For that reason, I always tell people to carry 300k/300k insurance at a minimum. If you have more exposure, like myself, i carry 1M/1M with another blanket umbrella policies. Am I totally protected, no but I am betting that 1M should be suffcient to cover 99% of any collision I am involved in or others that are working for us. But, it could all be false assumptions as someone always knows more, has more money and/or better lawyers.