car accident !!

collywollys

hi,
had an accident at the weekend (my fault).

i've instructed my insurance company to have a look at my car and see what the damage is. The CS rep said that i'm under no obligation to have mine repaired if i'm not happy with the cost of repair. Is this correct ??

thanks

thenudeone

If you want your insurers to repair it and pay for it under your policy, they can probably insist that one of their nominated repairers does the job. It's almost certainly in your policy documents.

InsideInsurance

No idea what a CS rep is?

You are under no obligation to claim for your own damages and neither are you required to use your insurers own repairers, though many will try and sell you the benefits of it and it would be easier to.

That said, if the third party are going to be making a claim against you then it will have more or less the same impact to next years premium irrespective of if you claim or not (unless we are talking a sub £1k claim).

For your own damages you will have to pay your excess towards them. There is typically no excess payable towards any TP claims.

collywollys

Customer service rep, sorry!

spoke to the garage who the insurance company use. My excess is £500 so obviously don't want to claim against my policy if i can help it.

Problem is i need to find out how bad the damage is so i'm going to take it down to the garage myself and pay for an estimate ( £20 ).

InsideInsurance

Depending on the age of the vehicle, and your level of comfort for cash payments, you may be better off going to a coachworks or such and say it is for a private repair - the initial quote will be significantly less than what the initial quote for an insurer would be (insurers never accept the first price either) for a variety of reasons.