Flood- and hail-damaged vehicles don't only feed the VIN cloning problem, they also resurface as regular used cars, sometimes carrying risks buyers never learn about, according to Shawn Vording (pictured), president of CARFAX Canada.
When a vehicle has been in a flood, owners generally take one of two paths, according to Vording: some decide they no longer want the car and sell it outright, while others file a claim large enough that the vehicle is declared a total loss. Those total losses typically get sold through auctions, repaired, and put back on the road.
"There are definitely consumers that will say, I don't want to own this car anymore, and they'll sell it," Vording said.
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The scale of that pipeline is significant. CARFAX Canada's most recent Year in Rear View report found more than 50,000 vehicles carrying severe weather-related damage on file. Alberta led the country with $454 million in weather-related claims, 91% of it tied to hail, followed by Ontario at $37.4 million and Quebec at $1.56 million in hail-related claims specifically. Wind damage added further losses, with Alberta again topping the list at $39.9 million, ahead of Ontario at $11.8 million and Nova Scotia at $1.16 million.
That resale pipeline runs alongside a separate problem tied to the same pool of vehicles. Salvage and flood-damaged cars have traditionally been the preferred source for criminals building cloned VINs, according to Vording.
"They still use those vehicles because they're off the road, they're pretty safe," Vording told Insurance Business. "There's not going to be a second vehicle generating history or getting registered because it's in a scrapyard or it's been salvaged."
That leaves a vehicle written off after a flood or hailstorm carrying two separate risks going forward: whether its damage history gets properly disclosed to the next buyer, and whether its VIN gets lifted and used to clone an entirely different stolen vehicle.
Identifying which vehicles were actually exposed to a given flood or hailstorm comes down to matching registration data against the timing and location of the event itself, according to Vording.
"Working with the insurance industry and government gives us the ability to report accurately on weather events. In many cases, we'll know that if a vehicle was registered in a flood area during the time of a flood," Vording said.
Flood exposure gets tracked on electric vehicles the same way it does on any other car, according to Vording, but battery health is a different story.
"In terms of battery health, it's an area that we're continuing to work to get access to better data," Vording said. "We do have some battery health data, but it's quite limited at this stage."
The gap comes down to fragmentation rather than a lack of effort, Vording said. The battery health data market is still fractured, with no single source that aggregates it. CARFAX is pulling that information together source by source, he said, since EVs still represent a small share of Canada's overall vehicle fleet, even as the segment grows.
"It's a very important and emerging segment, and a data element that will be included on our history report en masse," Vording said.
That pattern sits inside a broader shift in Canada's catastrophe losses. Flood and water-related insured losses have grown more than 300% over the past 20 years compared with the two decades before, according to CatIQ data.
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The federal government's Changing Climate Report 2026 goes further, projecting that the annual cost of flood damage to homes and buildings across the country could rise three to five times in the coming decades.
Recent events have already tested that trajectory: a September storm dumped more than 100 millimetres of rain on the Greater Toronto Area in a single day, flooding two major expressways and cutting power to more than 150,000 customers. That kind of event, more frequent and less predictable than a single catastrophic year, is exactly what keeps expanding the pool of vehicles that end up written off, sold, or repaired after a weather claim.
