Write Off?

vaio

notanewuser wrote: »

Tosh!!!

I did it last week with a 10 year old ford focus!!! Just the threat of legal action had the £1700 repair bill agreed (against car value of £1500).

Well done, on marginal cases like yours the legal action threat might well work but the general legal position is as I stated above.

The decision process the insurer went through would have been something like.....

cost to repair = £1700

cost to write off = £1500 plus unrecoverable small claims costs of £500 or £1000 to send somebody to court to defend & win the case against you.

Therefore they paid as it was the cheapest option, would have been a different story if the repair costs had been £5k or £10k. Then they would have defended and won

atrixblue.-MFR-.

Billy_Bonkers wrote: »

Take the payout, but not the first offer, bully them for more. Then ask to buy the car back off them (it will be cheap). Get it repaired yourself.

its becomeing harder to buy back the write off. its their discrection to allow you to buy it back these days.

theres a wating list for the VIC wich is approx £80.00 fee aswell.

i would prepare now, getting print offs of many civics in the same as condition as yours from fleabay, autotrader, local adverts and not budge from the price your willing to accept based on those cars.

Sreg civic unless a really desired typeR version isnt really worth putting back on the road.

HRC99

vaio wrote:

What sort of damage has your car suffered?

The rear bumper is quite crushed, damage to the exhaust and the boot is out of alignment.

No idea what that will cost. It might be fine just the guy at the repair centre was making noises about economic repair.

HRC99

Billy_Bonkers wrote: »

Take the payout, but not the first offer, bully them for more. Then ask to buy the car back off them (it will be cheap). Get it repaired yourself.

What right would the other party's insurers have to write my car off?

vaio

HRC99 wrote: »

The rear bumper is quite crushed, damage to the exhaust and the boot is out of alignment.

No idea what that will cost. It might be fine just the guy at the repair centre was making noises about economic repair.

On an £800 car you can pretty much guarantee that it will be written off.

options then become.....

take the money and let them have the car

Take the money, keep the car and get it repaired cheaply yourself (depends critically on what is needed to get the boot back into alignment)

Take the money and just carry on using it (assuming it is roadworthy)

atrixblue.-MFR-.

it will need jigging thats the first expensive cost youll encounter, it will need pulling out realigning, you can get an exhaust from anywhere and supply to be fitted to cut the costs down, in my experience its just the back box and possibly the middle section damaged, if not split and the garage has a pipe bender the can realign the exhaust on it.

the second big expenditure in the repair will be labour costs, the amount of time it will take to repair the car, you can help this by doing some prep work yourself, but if you dont know the first thing about it then best leave to pro's, there are verry good tutorials on youtube, (diyautoschool channel is a definetive guide if you dont mind the cussing and dry sense of humour of my friend pete).

use of second hand bumper head caution, make sure the clips are intact, there no previous damage hidden by paint work so examine the back of it for signs of patches and dents that shouldnt be there as when the paint is stripped back there will be more work involved in filling up old filler and reprep for paint, pattern parts on fleabay are another option but sometimes they just dont look right or fit propperly 80% of the time a second hand original manufacturer bumper is always better.

now comes the paint, there are two options, buy your own from your paint code, and supply that, or let the garage mix up the paint to the current body work, that include allowances for UV fade so new painted parts dont stick out like a sore thumb. paint is not cheap and ask the body shop what paint they prefure to use, eurethane-acrylic-waterbased-.

EdGasket

The problem with these situations is that the insurers offer you the 'book value' from some guide (glass's?) to which the general public does not have access. This can be substatially below the value of similar cars in local dealer's showrooms. Sometimes you can get them to 'up' the offer a bit by sending in several adverts of similar cars but it seems to me that one is never quite left 'no worse off than before'. Either you end up with a damaged/repaired car plus a lot of hassle or some cash which won't buy anything as good. C'est la vie I'm afraid.

Strider590

Be careful with that hire/courtesy car

atrixblue.-MFR-.

EdGasket wrote: »

The problem with these situations is that the insurers offer you the 'book value' from some guide (glass's?) to which the general public does not have access. This can be substatially below the value of similar cars in local dealer's showrooms. Sometimes you can get them to 'up' the offer a bit by sending in several adverts of similar cars but it seems to me that one is never quite left 'no worse off than before'. Either you end up with a damaged/repaired car plus a lot of hassle or some cash which won't buy anything as good. C'est la vie I'm afraid.

they cannot offer trade or book value. they have to offer the current market value as if it wasnt in an accident, they can reduce the price to the going rate cat C cat D repaired vehicle if it was in the past a repaired write off. FOS rules.

EdGasket

atrixblue.-MFR-. wrote: »

they cannot offer trade or book value. they have to offer the current market value as if it wasnt in an accident, they can reduce the price to the going rate cat C cat D repaired vehicle if it was in the past a repaired write off. FOS rules.

Well what they are supposed to do and what happens in practice are different things then. There are loads of threads on here saying that the OP was offered 'book value' and they couldn't get an equivalent car for that amount.