We'd like to remind Forumites to please avoid political debate on the Forum... Read More »
📨 Have you signed up to the Forum's new Email Digest yet? Get a selection of trending threads sent straight to your inbox daily, weekly or monthly!
Car Insurance - Without Drive Assist!
Options
Comments
-
All, I have had a differnet (But in terms of character) equally similar problem.
In August 2007 I was involved inn a car accident, person A entered the roundabout whilst I was on it and a collision occured. Person A was uninsured and had no licence. Police attended and Person A failed a roadside breathtest but brothe under at the station. As far as I know there were no lasting injuries. A girl in the other car did bang her head. We were both fine in my car but went to doctors anyway, my car was a write off, other car probably was but not certain. Liability is still in dispute believe it or not.
After the accident I had the car recovered by RAC who in turn recommended a company called drive assist who said that they could hire me a car and the cost would be billed to the third party. When I asked if I would have to pay I was told no...only if I was lying about the circumstances of the accident (My insurers were the company who use the red phone)(No longer my insurers). I hired a car from drive assist..through the RAC I believe but Direct Line seemed to not take issue to this and in correspondence to Drive Assist it would appear as though Direct Line have asked drive assist whether they want the costs of hire to be included in the county court claim. I at the time thankfully hired the car for only 2 days.
2 years later (almost) my claim has not been sorted and is still ongoing. I get the same letter from the solicitors each month saying that they are reviewing my file and looking to issue county court proceedings (In berkshire??). My insureres have been very very slow and complaint is due trust me.
What I am concerned about is drive assist have called me asking if I was aware the car hired to me was on a credit hire agreement and that I would be liable for the costs if they cant claim off the third party. As far as I was aware when I signed the PDA when they dropped off the car I was signing to agree damage, not a credit hire agreement. I would have never never signed it if I knew that is what it was. 2 years later it seems as though they are going to invoice me for the cost.
My insurers have been in contact with drive assist. But it seems now they wont or cannot add it on to the claim.
I wondered if anoyone else has had the same experience or not with this company. I rang the Finanial Ombudsmen and it seems they cannot do anything about drive assist. My insurance copmany is a different matter and they have said to complain about the time it has taken. Wonder if anoyone has any advice or has had a similar situation???
Many Thanks
John0 -
John have a look at Honest Johns website / forum, he has a lot of info on there. He detests credit hire companies especially when they do this to customers. If you cannot find the info you need on their send him an email as he is the Motoring Agony Aunt for the Telegraph and has a lot of clout in sorting things out.
(You could always ask for a copy of yourfile from DA including a transcript of the telephone call where you believe they missled you under the Data Protection Act for a nominal fee http://www.ico.gov.uk/0 -
Thank you to Dacouch for pointing me in the direction of this thread.
I am yet another person to be having trouble with Drive Assist. We received the car off of them in May after a lorry reversed into my car and it was written off. They came to collect the Drive Assist car on Saturday and the bloke had a quick look round the car and said everything was OK and to sign in the box on the PDA to say he was taking the car. He never asked me to read anything and didn't say anything about any damage to the car or attempt to point anything out.
Shortly after I receive an email from Drive Assist with the condition report stating there was 4 new pieces of damage to the car. Two chips on a side panel, a chip to the windscreen and and surface scratch that could be polished out. At the bottom of this document is my signature which makes it look like I have signed to agree to this document. A document I have never seen before and certainly wouldn't have agreed with. They car was a darn site cleaner when they picked it up than when we received it and there defiantly was any additional damage to it.
My DH has since phoned them twice and they have said that we where going to be charged £250 for the damage and that if he hadn't had phone they would have immediately taken it off of my Credit card. They are now sending out a dispute form which we have to complete, but there is no way on earth this company will be getting any money off of us.
We are both absolutely fuming and I considered what they have done regarding my signature to be fraud, we told them this and they were not the least bit interested.
What further action do you advise we take? I have already canceled my Credit card so they most defiantly won't be getting any money of me that way, ha ha!! DH is dealing with it all now as being pregnant I could really do without more stress.:(
Kel0 -
Gosh , i'm glad i googled drive assist and ended up finding this thread!
A drunk driver , a neighbour to boot , hit our car on thursday. Not massive damage but scrapped the bumper and as the car is only 2month sold we are well peed off as you can imagine.
I'm insured with prudential who have got a repairer to come round this afternoon to look at the damage and give me a booking in date.
In the mean time i've had drive assist on the phone to arrange a hire car. The lady i spoke to has been very clear about all the details including the £175 excess , optional waiver thing , signing to handheld report to accept the condition of the car etc. etc. made it all sound a bit scary to be honest as i was thinking of what would happen if we got a stone chip etc. which to me is normal wear and tear really and shouldn't be billed.
The lady is ringing me back this afternoon to see when my booking in date is to arrange a car to be delievered. Don't think i'll bother now! I'll ask the repairer if they can supply a courtesy car , if not we'll manage without.
Deb x0 -
Well I had a call from the legal people from my insurers this morning and I mentioned to her I had done a bit of research on the net and that what they have done seems to be a common scam of theirs.
Funnily enough I have just taken a call from drive assist and they have looked into the damage and have dropped the charges incited. Apparently it was within normal wear and tear.
So glad it was resolved quickly but I will never be dealing with this company again. I will be searching for an insurance company next year who don't use these people.0 -
madison-nyc wrote: »Gosh , i'm glad i googled drive assist and ended up finding this thread!
A drunk driver , a neighbour to boot , hit our car on thursday. Not massive damage but scrapped the bumper and as the car is only 2month sold we are well peed off as you can imagine.
I'm insured with prudential who have got a repairer to come round this afternoon to look at the damage and give me a booking in date.
In the mean time i've had drive assist on the phone to arrange a hire car. The lady i spoke to has been very clear about all the details including the £175 excess , optional waiver thing , signing to handheld report to accept the condition of the car etc. etc. made it all sound a bit scary to be honest as i was thinking of what would happen if we got a stone chip etc. which to me is normal wear and tear really and shouldn't be billed.
The lady is ringing me back this afternoon to see when my booking in date is to arrange a car to be delievered. Don't think i'll bother now! I'll ask the repairer if they can supply a courtesy car , if not we'll manage without.
Deb x
Maddison Drive Assist will only loan you a car if they are almost certain the accident is not your fault and they can recover their very expensive costs.
What you could do is simply ring the other drivers Insurers up and ask them to provide a like for like car. They will pay for it and drop it off.0 -
Well I had a call from the legal people from my insurers Tthis morning and I mentioned to her I had done a bit of research on the net and that what they have done seems to be a common scam of theirs.
Funnily enough I have just taken a call from drive assist and they have looked into the damage and have dropped the charges incited. Apparently it was within normal wear and tear.
So glad it was resolved quickly but I will never be dealing with this company again. I will be searching for an insurance company next year who don't use these people.
Thats good news Kel, you will see from the other posters that they have not been so lucky and have to take matters much further0 -
Following an accident where I was hit from behind and the other driver admitted liability my car was undriveable and had to be taken away for repairs. My insurance company passed me to Drive Assist to supply a replacement car. I thought that this was the standard way of supplying a courtesy car, and I didn't know that I could have refused the Drive Assist car and asked for one from the other party's insurers or the approved repairers. However I felt uneasy at being told that I would have to pay the hire charges if Drive Assist could not recover the costs from the other party, and about having my signature electronically appended to documents that I had never actually seen before, so I googled Drive Assist and saw all of these negative threads and have been very worried since then! We were very careful with the hire car and gave it back in pristine condition. The driver collecting the car checked it then I signed a screen on a PDA stating that there was no damage, the car was clean, and the petrol tank was 1/4 full. A short while later I received email confirmation that the car was fine on collection. As you can imagine I was immensely relieved. So now I just have to wait and hope that Drive Assist manage to recover the hire costs from the other person's insurance. Even if this process goes smoothly right to the end, if I ever have another accident I will avoid this company because I pay extra on my insurance policy for provision of a courtesy car during car repairs, so there should be no question of my being potentially personally liable to pay hire costs: these should be paid by the insurance company of the party at fault. And even when the other party is paying I think that the cheapest method of car hire should be used, and this is not Drive Assist.0
-
I've had a car collected today from Drive Assist after a fortnight without my own. I googled them after the car was delivered and was absolutely mortified with all the forum complaints, so much so that I've been completely stressed out about the collection, expecting a nightmare saga to land upon me.
After collection, I received about an hour later an e-mail with the vehicle condition report - it was fine. No new damage reported, car just as they left it.
The drivers were all courteous and friendly and the service has been to be perfectly honest, excellent.
Perhaps they've taken notice of all the bad press and changed their ways, perhaps I've just been lucky.
Just thought it was only fair to report a good experience.0 -
I work at Drive Assist and am actively looking for another job cos this place is a joke! So are my mates who work in new claims and compliance.
The scams that i and my mates have seen are unbelievable! These include...
* claims sent to insurance companies stating the client was in hire for 7 days when the client was only in hire for 3-4 days.
* Multiple delays on the credit repair side of the business (each day the customers own car is not repaired means another days credit hire for drive assist!)
* Staff told to blatently lie to the customer regarding delivery times.
* Depot drivers informed that they are held responsible for any damage while driving to a customer. Thats why they rush through the inspection on delivery and inspect thoroughly on collection! The drivers are 50 hour per weekers on minimum wage!
* The worst thing of all was in July 2008 when a credit card scam was uncovered. Any one that has used D.Assist will know that they offer their own extra insurance called 'collision damage waiver' sometimes called 'excess waiver' to customers to protect the credit hire vehicle for a few pounds per day. The staff get a bonus per booked car and per cdw taken out. A small number of the staff were taking credit card details from customers who had opted for the cdw and putting them onto the customers who had declined cdw to get extra bonus! Card details should never even be written down due to data protection, but they must have been, to do this scam as the system should lock the details in once the enter key has been pressed. When it all came to light instead of the guilty staff being sacked, the compliance manager Bob Monk decided to keep them on because they were good bookers! The FSA would have a field day down here.
Believe me i would never give them my card details!
This company has a really high staff turnover and is well known in the area for being a cowboy outfit. They pay poverty wages with a pay secrecy clause, a secrecy cause about what goes on in the company, and i dont just mean the data protection! and numerous one sided clauses written into the employment contract. Its not just the customers who get the 'read the small print' treatment.
Do not use them!0
This discussion has been closed.
Confirm your email address to Create Threads and Reply
Categories
- All Categories
- 351.2K Banking & Borrowing
- 253.2K Reduce Debt & Boost Income
- 453.7K Spending & Discounts
- 244.2K Work, Benefits & Business
- 599.3K Mortgages, Homes & Bills
- 177K Life & Family
- 257.6K Travel & Transport
- 1.5M Hobbies & Leisure
- 16.2K Discuss & Feedback
- 37.6K Read-Only Boards