Car written off advice please.

xxdeebeexx

On friday night / saturday morning DH car was smashed into, when it was parked outside our house, and will certainly be written off. He is absolutely devistated.
He has an excess of £150 to pay (my fault as I arranged the insurance) but the car is probably only worth about £600.

He feels cheated as he has done nothing wrong and now faces the inconvenience of being without a car along with having to pay the excess.

He wants to buy the car back to see if he can get it repaired. How can he do this? Does he say this before the insurance company take it away or after?

Is there a way of claiming back the £150 excess off the other insurance ?

We have never had to deal with this before and would be grateful for any advice.

TIA

Dx

lesalanos

do you know who ran into it?

if so then you will claim off their insurance with no excess

xxdeebeexx

lesalanos wrote: »

do you know who ran into it?

if so then you will claim off their insurance with no excess

Yes police arrested the driver and we have insurance details etc.
That would be great if he could claim it back. Is there anything else he could claim ie hire car

Thanks

Dx

flossy_splodge

xxdeebeexx wrote: »

Yes police arrested the driver and we have insurance details etc.
That would be great if he could claim it back. Is there anything else he could claim ie hire car

Thanks

Dx

That depends on what your insurance covers you for I think.
Do you have fully comp, 3rd party or what?

xxdeebeexx

flossy_splodge wrote: »

That depends on what your insurance covers you for I think.
Do you have fully comp, 3rd party or what?

Oh is fully comp. He also has a type of legal cover as well.

Dx

Older_but_not_wiser_2

This happened to me recently, van ran into back of my car. My legal cover sorted it all out - got a hire car whilst my one was being repaired, and no excess to pay as they are claiming this back from the third parties insurance.

Get onto his legal cover folk tomorrow and ask about it.

Lum

Since you know who did it and they (presumably) are insured then claim directly off their insurance, or if you can't find that out], or you get messed about by them, go to a dedicated claims management company such as HelpHire.

Only your own insurance have the power to write your car off, you can insist that their insurance pay to repair your car regardless of how much they say your car is worth. Personally I'm not sure I'd want to repair a car that had been in a bad smash though.

If you do want to try to maximise the write off value, you need to start going through the autotrader etc. looking for ads for cars like yours to show to the assessor.

Always be nice to the assessor, they are supposed to be independent and if you can give them a bunch of ads that saves them some work, and don't annoy them, you're more likely to get the outcome your want.