Car Written Off Question

Bl4ckGryph0n

Perhaps time to get ones own insurance involved.

vu5ter

I'm leaning towards this now, recover the vehicle back to a local garage 80  miles,  get a courtesy car whilst my insurance sort it out. Probably end up costing the TP insurance more but they didn't seem particularly bothered when I pointed this out to them

Greg Hook

I'm sure there are more knowledgeable folks when it comes to insurance. But I understood that you should never deal direct with a 3rd party insurance company as they are not interested in you in the slightest. You should always go through your own insurance and let them deal with the 3rd party, but I may be wrong on this.

crashcris

I don't know who your insurer is but I had a similar situation. I was with Direct Line and my parked car was written off. Initially they sent my car for repair locally and this took several weeks, when I picked it up the steering was off and dangerous. I called them again and this time upon my insistence they sent it to a proper Main Ford dealership, who declared the car dangerous and wrote it off. This all took many weeks and there were very many phone calls to DL and they were doing their best not to go over the Approx £2200 they'd initially offered me. However, I battled hard and drew attention to the fact that they'd offered me a hire car for the time Mine was in repair and that I hadn't taken them up on that. Eventually they agreed to give me £2600 for the car and an extra £40 per day I hadn't used my car or a replacement car. This totalled £4000. Result!

I tell you this just in case there's a chance that you too could have been offered a replacement car whilst being carless.

PS, why haven't you talked to your own insurer? I thought whosever fault it is you'd need to notify your own insurers and let them battle it out with the other insurers.

vu5ter

Hi Crashcris

Thanks for taking your time to reply (and off course to everyone also).  

I was eager to get the car fix and pointed the fact that I don't want a courtesy car to put it to getting it repaired.  With hindsight might have been a mistake.  Reason why I didn't involve my own insurance was from previous experience really.  

The first time - non fault went through my insurance and they sent a claim handler who arranged everything from courtesy car to getting the car repaired at an authorised dealer.  Everything went smoothly as you would expect as it was no cost to my own insurance, but when it came to settling the accounts, the claim handler really went to town and what was a minor rear bumper repair ended costing the 3rd party insurance close to £10k as I recall.  

Second time again non fault rear ender and the 3rd party insurance contacted me directly within the hour.  Arranged for my car to be taken to an authorised dealer and had a courtesy car of similar spec to mine until my car was repaired.  This time it was less then half the cost of the first incident.

Just to update, we finally agreed on £3,000 car fully written off just to put the matter to bed.  Can't say I'm 100% happy with the result but there are more important things in life to waste my time with insurance company.

Off course when it comes to renewal time the insurance co. will make my blood boil again - no doubt premium will shoot up again due to another non fault accident.

Vu5ter