Car fire claim

airtool

Can anyone give advice please, My sons car caught fire and is a total right off.
He has full comp insurance but when he took out the policy online stated when asked the "approximate" cost of car he unfortunately undervalued car by around £1000.
The policy states that in the event of a right off he will be paid a market price and will not suffer any loss to purchase a comparable car.
The insurance company have phoned him today and stated that they are going to use his "approx" figure has the maximum they intend paying and are sending a cheque in post.
He stated that if he had put an inflated figure as approx car value would they have paid that sum and they said NO it does not work like that.
So my my question is how is legal an "approx" figure, and should he refuse cheque, send it back and take it up with the insurance ombudsman.
Thanks

rs65

It should be market value

http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/technical_notes/motor-valuation.html#2

We are likely to award the policyholder the full retail value, even if he/she inadvertently under-estimated the value of the vehicle when filling in the proposal form or luckily bought the vehicle for less than it was worth. And we have seen exceptional cases where a vehicle’s value genuinely rose between the date it was bought and the date of the damage/theft.

dacouch

Will be interesting to see the batch of people who've arranged quotes on x figure and then requoted on a lower with the same Insurer and then taken out the lower figure.

If the Insurer tracked it on their systems, my reading of the Ombudsman stance would mean would not then have "inadvertently"underestimated and the above would be no use.

airtool

Thanks RS65 that was excellent ! and yes you got a point there dacouch i am not sure if a policies cost could go up or down according to a drivers self evaluation or do insurance companies just price on the vehicle type ?
As a matter of interest next time i carry out an online quote i will adjust valuation to see if it makes a difference.
On a side note my son although having full comprehensive was soon informed that it was the norm that a "courtesy" car was supplied only if the car went for repair not stolen or in his case burnt out possibly by an electrical fault, an £8500 ford focus up in smoke in minutes.

InsideInsurance

airtool wrote: »

Thanks RS65 that was excellent ! and yes you got a point there dacouch i am not sure if a policies cost could go up or down according to a drivers self evaluation or do insurance companies just price on the vehicle type ?
As a matter of interest next time i carry out an online quote i will adjust valuation to see if it makes a difference.
On a side note my son although having full comprehensive was soon informed that it was the norm that a "courtesy" car was supplied only if the car went for repair not stolen or in his case burnt out

Different insurers rate differently, certainly with one former client the declared price was only used to determine if (a) TPFT/TPO could be bought and (b) if a tracker was needed but not for actual pricing.

A courtesy car is provided by the garage that are doing the repairs "for free" (in reality its built into the hourly rate). Of cause if no garage is doing any repairs then they aren't going to be willing to give someone a free car.

Most insurers offer some form of "guaranteed" car which is actually a hire car and thus is available for both total losses and stolen not recovered claims.

in_my_bumble_opinion

It's just round 1. You should, of course, refuse that offer and play the long game.