Car insurance claim issues

arles417

Hi all,

Last Saturday whilst sitting stationary in a 3 mile traffic jam (due to another accident), someone drove into the stationary car behind me, causing it to crash into me.

As we all swapped details, the driver at the back admitted liability (hard not to when she was the only one moving).

Anyway her insurer rang on the Monday (Direct Line) and admitted liability and asked if she could first sort the car out. She arranged for a hire car and a local company to repair the damage and asked if she could also look at the personal injury side of things. I said yes to all, I thought I'd give them a chance before going to an ambulance chaser.

The guy picked up my car and I explained the issues (rear bumper damage, exhaust now blowing, the clutch screaming and smoking and the engine cuts out when switching it on). The car was clearly undrivable.

So I got a call today from the repairers and they stated that the engine issues (clutch and cutting out) were not as a result of the accident and I would have to pay for them to be rectified. I got him to admit that the car was not able to be driven and asked him how I would have got the car to the site of the accident with the car in that state and he told me it was not possible but they still would not complete all the repairs.
I spoke to the insurer and they said that if I coud get an independant engineer who said it was because of the accident, then they will cover the repairs. After some arguing, I got him to speak to the repairers again and he came back and said that even though he and the repairer admit the car is undrivable and I could not have gotten the car to the accident in that state, they were still denying liability for the engine issues. They said that due to the accident only being to the rear of my car, the front could not be their responsibility. They also stated that they are now going to send the car to the dealers and they will stick the computer on it which will show the cause of the faults.

Anyway sorry for the long winded post but I think they believe the engine issues will be costly and are still going to try and get out of it. I was intending to let Direct Line deal with the personal injury side as well but dont feel as if I can trust them.

Has anyone any advice that can help me or do you think I am going to have to pay and will be stuffed?

Any answers would be appreciated.

Graham

Quentin

If the engine issues aren't as a result of the incident then you will have to pay for that part of the repair (though you may want to have the car moved the to your own choice of repairer for that to be done)

You really ought to get your own legal rep to deal with the injury side of this (irrespective of how trustworthy they are, there is a conflict of interest for them if you have no independent adviser on your side)

InsideInsurance

Increasingly it is the Garage that actually makes the decision on if something is accident related or not so clearly it is in their interest to say that it is as they then get more business for having to do more repairs. Whilst they have to balance that against audits to ensure they are making correct decisions if there is doubt they generally will tend to push things a little bit.

I assume you only have rear end damage and you weren't shunted into the vehicle in front? You dont mention what car you have (though I don't know enough about cars really any way for it to make a big difference) but it evidently doesnt sound right that damage to the rear bumper of a stationary vehicle causes the clutch/ engine if there wasnt something else very wrong with the clutch/ engine beforehand.

As to the PI side.... some would argue that you'll get a bigger settlement direct because they'll slightly over pay to stop an ambulance chaser coming in later on in the process... others will argue that you'll be robbed as you don't have legal "experts" telling you if the settlement is reasonable or not.