Written Off Car - Help please!

Be careful with hire car costs...
Friend of mine was given a Scirocco tdi as a hire car when his 323i got rear ended and written off... 6months later he was caught in the middle of a law suit between the 2 insurers.
Basically (and this is standard practice) his insurer massively inflated their costs (inc the hire car), to pass the cost onto the other insurer. It's a way of increasing their competitors overheads.
Trouble is, as all the sneaky little bastards are at it, it just increases all costs universally...... = higher premiums

G

Most insurance will pay out instead of you having a hire car/courtesy car from repairers. If you are careful you can coin it in.

When my car was written off, the insurance company paid me what I told them it was worth when I insured it. When I looked for similar cars on Autotrader, my car was actually worth a lot less than this figure (less than a third!), so I in effect upgraded. If you told them it was worth less, don't expect a bigger payout. Good luck with it, but they are not all that bad.

A little bit of an update:

Had a phonecall from the other party's insurance company today, telling me that our car was a write off. Apparently they stopped assessing it when the damage reached the £2,000 mark..!

They have provided an initial offer of £2,800. Although in fairness to the insurance bloke he himself advised me not to take his first offer (which I thought was a bit bizarre!), and to go away and have a search for like-for-like replacements.

I've now done this, and there are a few cars local(ish) to us with a similar mileage etc. for between £3,100 and £3,500.

We won't actually be buying a like-for-like replacement (my sister is hopefully going to sell us her car), but would you say it was worth negotiating for £3,500 bearing in mind that we'll have to travel to pick it up and we'd have to pay insurance admin fees etc to have the policy swapped over to the new car.

If it makes any difference, the insurance company we're dealing with is NFU Mutual.

you should go for as much as you can.they do the same to you.why should you pay out more when the insurance should...

Some good news!!

Just been back to our insurers for a quote on a few cars. Braced myself for the seemingly inevitable price-hike and was very pleasantly surprised to find that our insurance hasn't increased by a single penny for the same age/spec car, and the only thing we'd have to pay is a £25 admin fee to change the policy over to the new one. I also got a quote for my Sister's car which is the same shape/age as ours, but which is the 2.0L Titanium TDCi with low mileage and all the trimmings, and that was less than a tenner a month extra too. Plus she's getting a new car through work so has said that she'd be willing to let us buy it with our insurance money

I'd heard all sorts of stories about insurance costs jumping (even though the accident wasn't our fault), so I'm very happy

For info (just in case anyone is interested), we're with M & S because it was by far and away the cheapest when we renewed last year. I've been really impressed with the way they've dealt with us since the accident and I'd recommend them


For once, a GOOD insurance news story!

this is irony ...after handing out some tips my other half got shunted at a roundabout and were now waiting to hear about our car now....sheesh.thats good to hear on the costs..now all ya have to do is choose a new vee- hikal....my suggestion ..get a smart car ...they are sooo cool...

gibbleking":2tevvsdg said:

this is irony ...after handing out some tips my other half got shunted at a roundabout and were now waiting to hear about our car now....sheesh.thats good to hear on the costs..now all ya have to do is choose a new vee- hikal....my suggestion ..get a smart car ...they are sooo cool...

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Sorry to hear about your accident. I hope your insurance company are as easy to deal with as ours were.

Haha, I love Smart Cars (especially the Brabus ). My girlfriend on the other hand...

we had a brand new hyundai hatch within two hours...very fast stuff...

gibbleking":1afh3fwh said:

we had a brand new hyundai hatch within two hours...very fast stuff...

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Nice - that wouldn't be the Veloster would it? I like them

Hyundais certainly ain't what they used to be, that's for sure!