Car Insurance - vehicle values

nescalola

I contacted my car insurer to tell them I didn't want to renew my policy as I had had a better quote on the internet! Of course they wanted to know what I'd been quoted and eventually they came up with a decent offer so I accepted it. However, to cut a long story short, one of the ways they did this was by lowering the value of my vehicle which I was dubious about! They assured me that by valuing my vehicle for £9,500 on the quote, which lowered the premium, even if my car is worth £14,000 I will get the market value at the time if anything were to happen to it! I think this sounds 'wrong'! Surely I'm under insuring my car? I said to the Customer Service Advisor that it sounded 'wrong' as someone with a high value sports car could say it was worth much less just to get a cheaper quote! On another level...if your contents of your house are insured for £60k and your house burns down or floods, I'm sure if you actually had £90k of possessions they wouldn't give you the extra?!
Any advice on this would be appreciated!

dacouch

If you inadvertantly insure your car for a lower value than it is there is some case history with the ombudsman that they make the Insurer pay the higher amount. However this is subject to you not doing this on purpose to obtain a cheaper premium and that the Insurer would cover the vehicle with that value in the first place (Some Insurers do not like cars valued over say £35000.

I would not recommend you do this as if you needed to claim you would need to complain to the Ombudsman and try and prove the broker told you to do this and even if you did manage to prove it the Ombudsman would probably say that you were party to miss leading the Insurer. This would leave you with the option of sueing the broker which in reality would probably not be worth it.

Relevant quote from the Ombudsman "We are likely to award the policyholder the full retail value, even if he/she inadvertently under-estimated the value of the vehicle when filling in the proposal form or luckily bought the vehicle for less than it was worth. And we have seen exceptional cases where a vehicle’s value genuinely rose between the date it was bought and the date of the damage/theft" http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/technical_notes/motor-valuation.html

I would recommend you give this broker the big swerve as