Thank you all. I especially like the sound of that last post!
The idea behind insurance is that if someone damages your car, they are required to restore it to the condition it was before they damaged it. Put another way, you can sue anyone for anything, but if their insurance company repairs the car to the condition it was in before the accident, you really do not have a case for a lawsuit.
The typical situation is someone with a 6-month-old car that gets totaled, and they paid $30K and get $25K (while owing the bank $28K). Everyone hears about how a car loses X% of its value when you drive it off the lot. They talk about how the insurance settlement was unfair. But if they can go out and buy a 6-month-old car for $28K, it is fair.
Your situation is *DIFFERENT*. Your car has never been driven off the lot! It is a brand-new car. If it was totaled, the transport company would owe you the full value of the car, with no deduction for depreciation.
If the transport company isn't calling you immediately and doing everything they can to be nice to you, or it looks like they aren't going to satisfy you, it might be worth checking with a lawyer. Write down everything that the employee said/did that made you feel that you had to sign for delivery (that could be very important). You can try telling the transport company that you are thinking of getting a lawyer involved, and mention that it is a car with no depreciation, and they might end up having to pay your lawyer fees. A lawyer can also check to see who the legal owner of the car was when the damage was done (probably you, but if it was the car dealer, the car may still belong to them if you did not "accept" it).
Note that while others talk about how they would not have signed the papers, if you were the legal owner of the car (as opposed to the dealership), there may have been no reason not to. It's possible that by not signing the papers they might have legally been able to sell the car to cover their fees and give you the difference. So it may be good that you signed the papers.
The (slight) good news is that there was 0 depreciation on the car when the shipping company picked it up. So you could probably argue that even fixing the car isn't good enough (as the value will be less than a brand-new car; when you sell it, someone will pay less given that there was damage that was fixed). They transported the car knowing that it had 0 depreciation, and accepted that responsibility.
If it were me, after doing a lot of research about this type of situation, which I'm sure happens occasionally, I would fight for a new car. As you point out, delivering a damaged-but-fixed car is not the same as delivering a new car, and the damaged-but-fixed car is worth less than a new car. With a used car, value is subjective. But the value of a new car is crystal clear, there is no wiggle room. You can ask them point-blank "If you just fix the car, it will be worth less than when you took possession of it, so how do you expect to compensate me for the difference?"
I've rambled a bit, but hopefully given you some ideas.
