Complaining to Car Insurance with regard to small claim

colin_stocker

A few months ago, my wife was driving our Freelander 2 and was hit by another driver (of another Freelander!).

Fortunately the to vehicles only clashed wing mirrors and the worst damage was a few scratches and broken glass.

The driver of the other vehicle acted very oddly from the beginning. He first insisted my wife pay for all the damage at the roadside and acted quite aggressively. He then refused to give his insurance details but later relented when the police were called. He then refused to negotiate with regards to getting the repairs done and insisted that everything go through the insurance. This seemed odd to us for such a small repair.

We repaired our own car by ordering an £11 mirror from the Internet and following simple instructions to fit and did not make a claim from our insurance company.

We are now informed that he has claimed £344 which has been paid out by the insurance company. This seems completely unreasonable given the damage sustained to our own car.

They have decided the claim was 50-50. Reasonable enough as neither party can prove fault (although my wife swears she was inside the white line).

We asked our insurance company to investigate why his repairs amounted to so much, but they seem incapable. In fact when they found the invoice for the repair it seemed to be for a rear mirror and not a side mirror.

We now face losing 5 years no claims bonus. If we want to avoid this we are being asked for £209.

We are going to write a letter of complaint as past experience has shown it's always better to have a paper trail.

Do the insurance company have a duty to investigate that the repair costs they are paying for are reasonable?

Does anyone have experience of pursuing this type of complaint?

forgotmyname

You wil lbee to push them and complain. They will usually choose the path of least cost.

If his claim is for £300 its probably cheaper to pay that than send someone out to investigate.

Quentin

This claim won't cost you all your NCD. A single claim usually means no NCD is awarded for the year in which the claim is made, and 2 years are removed from the entitlement you had at the start of the year (usually with 5 as the max, irrespective of how many years you had above 5).

So if you had 5 years, then you will go down to 3 at renewal. (If you had 8, then you would normally go down to 3). Check your policy for the way your insurer deals with NCD and fault claims.

Do some online dummy quotes with and without your current ncd to see what difference this makes to your premium before deciding whether or not to "buy back" your NCD.

Your complaint will probably not get far, it may be that his electric mirror required replacing which will explain the cost. But you can send in a complaint if you want - the complaints procedure will be set out in your policy.

On a brighter note, you can now claim 50% of your repair costs off the third party insurer!

BertTheRaccoon

Your insurers should have queried the cost of repairs before they reimbursed anything, so the odds are, they have already been satisfied that the repair costs are a direct and consequential loss to this incident.

In my experience, a third party insurer will not just write a cheque for the repairs to another vehicle without seeing an estimate and often an engineer's report to make sure only accident-related damage is being claimed for and also that the parts prices are within the range of a system they all use called Audatex.

Odds are that the other party has used some form of approved repairer of their insurer, who will only use original manufacturer's parts (very costly) and this will be where a lot of the expense comes from.

If the other freelander was a newer model than yours you may find the cost of parts is much higher. Gone are the days of just bolting on another wing mirror on very modern vehicles, they then need to have a code reader used to code the mirror to the car (essentially telling the car's computer it has a wing mirror fitted).

You probably would be as well spending the £209 to reimburse your insurer the 50% of the outlay they have had for the third party claim in order to zero out their outlay and have them allow the NCD. This will not give you immunity to future premium increases as you will still have to declare this incident and they will still increase your premiums because you have been involved in some action. But it will probably be less than losing a couple of years NCD.

That's my thoughts on the matter anyway.

InsideInsurance

Not sure the value differences but £418 is not very expensive for an insurance claim in the slightest.

Phone your local LandRover garage and ask how much they'd charge to supply and fit a new wing mirror - assume its electric and heated if these are options. Given the minimal work required they'll almost certainly charge you service rates rather than bodyshop which almost certainly go above £100/hr

Add to that if it was a non-approved garage they may well have sent an independent engineer to inspect it which again can be over £100

Whilst they could contest it they'd almost certainly need their own independent engineers report along with a review of the other engineers report etc which is going to cost £100+.... it is questionable to pay that amount of money, that'd be unrecoverable, to dispute only £208