Audatex Autosource valuation reports explained

An Autosource report — Solera's total-loss product, still widely called Audatex — is laid out differently from its competitors in one way that changes how you read it.

Where other reports show you a set of comparable vehicles and adjust each one towards your car, Autosource leads with a Typical Vehicle and adjusts that towards yours. The central table has three columns: Typical Vehicle, Your Vehicle, and Adjustment. Every line is the software saying "the typical example of this car has X, yours has Y, so here is the difference in dollars."

Once you see that, the report is much easier to argue with, because every disagreement becomes a disagreement about one row.

The sections

An Autosource report runs roughly in this order:

Administrative Data — the claim, the insurer, the vehicle, the date of loss.

VINSOURCE Analysis — a VIN decode check, reporting whether the VIN "Decodes Correctly" and what vehicle history was found. Worth a glance: if the decode is wrong, the Typical Vehicle it built is the wrong car.

Vehicle Description — the full equipment list, under the heading Market-Driven Valuation. This is long and dull and it is where uncredited options hide. Read it against your window sticker.

Valuation Detail — the three-column table described above. Seat options, glass condition, miscellaneous adjustments, and a line for date-of-loss adjustment all appear here as individual rows with individual dollar figures.

Vehicle Condition — see below; this is the part worth most of your attention.

Condition Description — narrative definitions of what each condition grade means, broken out for interior, exterior, mechanical and tires.

Valuation Notes — including subsections for the Autosource valuation process, other adjustments or comments, and conditioning notes. The conditioning notes are where the inspector's actual observations are written down, in sentences.

Comparable Vehicle Details — the vehicles behind the base value.

Vehicle Condition is graded component by component

This is Autosource's most distinctive feature and its most useful one.

Rather than a single overall condition grade, the report grades individual components separately — seats, carpets, interior trim, glass, headliner, paint, engine, front tires and rear tires each get their own rating, on a scale running through descriptions like Good, Minor Wear, Moderate Wear, Minor Work and Moderate Damage.

That granularity cuts both ways, and it is worth understanding why.

It is harder to dispute in bulk. You cannot argue that "the condition adjustment is wrong" — there isn't one adjustment, there are nine.

It is much easier to dispute precisely. Each grade is a separate factual claim about a specific part of your car, and each one can be answered separately. If the paint was graded down for peeling on one corner, that is a specific, checkable assertion — and it is a claim about one panel, not about the car.

The Conditioning Notes matter here more than anywhere else in the document, because that is where the observation behind a grade is written out. A grade with a note is a judgment you can engage with. A grade with no note is a judgment with nothing behind it, and that is the thing to point at.

What the Condition Description section gives you

Autosource prints its condition definitions inside the report, under headings for interior, exterior, mechanical and tires.

That is genuinely useful and slightly unusual — it means the standard your car was measured against is in your hands, rather than being a configuration setting you would have to ask about. Read the definition for the grade you were given, then read the one above it. If your car meets the higher description, you have a specific, quotable argument that uses the report's own words.

Where the comparables sit

Comparable Vehicle Details comes late in the document, after the condition work — which is a reasonable reflection of where the money usually is in an Autosource report, but not a reason to skip it. The base value still comes from those vehicles, and the state rules on how comparables may be chosen apply here as much as to any other vendor.

What your own state requires of those comparables — how far away they may be, how recent, and whether every adjustment has to be itemized — is set out state by state in the comparable vehicles guide.

What to check

1. The VIN decode, in VINSOURCE Analysis. Everything downstream is built on it.
2. The equipment list, against your window sticker.
3. Each condition grade separately, and whether a conditioning note supports it.
4. The condition definitions printed in the report, against the grade you were given.
5. The comparables, for distance and mileage against your state's rule.
6. The settlement total, for sales tax and fees.

A note on sourcing

The section names and the structure above were taken from an Autosource valuation report published in full as part of a public municipal record, and checked against Solera's own product material. That report concerns a real person's insurance claim, so it is described here only structurally and is deliberately not linked — nothing about their vehicle, their claim or their identity appears above, and none of it is any of our business.

Nothing here characterizes Autosource's method as unfair. Grading condition component by component and printing the definitions in the report is, if anything, more transparent than the alternative.

What to ask for when the report is thin

Autosource reports vary a great deal in how much they print. Some include the full comparable detail with adjustments itemized per vehicle; others print a summary and keep the working elsewhere. If yours is one of the short ones, the request to make is for the complete valuation file rather than for an explanation — a file is a thing that exists and can be sent, whereas an explanation is something an adjuster has to compose, which takes longer and arrives vaguer.

Specifically, ask for the comparable detail pages showing each vehicle's source, listing date, distance and full adjustment breakdown; the condition grade and whatever inspection record supports it; and the equipment list the valuation was built from. Those three documents answer nearly every question worth asking, and in several states you are entitled to at least some of them as a matter of course rather than on request.

What the report does not tell you

Two things are missing from every one of these reports, and both are worth noticing because their absence is easy to read as their not mattering.

The first is your state's rules. The report is generated the same way in every state, and it makes no attempt to say whether the comparables it selected satisfy the standard where you live. A report can be internally consistent, properly documented and still built on comparables your state does not permit.

The second is the reasoning behind the condition grade. The report shows the grade and its effect on the value, but the observation that produced it — who looked at the car, when, and what they saw — is in the claim file rather than in the document you were sent.

Where the report is usually right

It is worth saying plainly, because a letter that disputes everything persuades nobody: the vehicle identification, the equipment list where it is complete, and the mileage adjustment are usually correct. Autosource is a serious product used by serious companies, and most of what it prints is defensible.

What is worth checking is narrower and more specific: where the comparables came from geographically, how old the listings are, whether the condition grade has anything behind it, and whether the settlement summary carries the tax and fee lines your state requires. Those are the places where a nationally-built valuation and a state-governed settlement can legitimately diverge, and they are where the money in a total-loss dispute actually sits.