No fault accident now car is a total loss

dacouch

arcon5 wrote: »

Not at all... insurers don't use by far the cheapest contractors. For starters most use the likes of National for windscreens, and anybody whose ever got a quote from them versus more local/smaller suppliers will know how significant the price is.

Same situation when they supply courtesy cars to customers and bill the third party insurer.... nobody on this planet would pay the rates some of these insurance companies would pay for vehicle hire!!

They don't pay anywhere near the amounts you think they do with Autoglass, in addition they get an outsourced windscreen claims service for free. It also helps prevent the dodgy sun roof installations from the back street suppliers.

They pay a high amount for credit hire for which they have little option. When they arrange hire cars themselves they get very very good prices from Enterprise etc

boatman

I know from my no-fault accident the handling company were on the phone trying to get me into a hire car before they had even seen the car let alone fixed it. Car was worth about £1300, hit from behind, chassis needed straightening along with new bumper, they never suggested writing it off even though it was cheaper, i can only assume they would have made more money from the repair. I would guess the car hire alone would have been for around 10 days, they turned up with a nice 3 series BMW for about £90 a day before they had assessed the car. At that point i refused and called the whole repair off, asked for write off. The daily hire rate for one equivalent to mine was about £55(http://apps.abi.org.uk/tphire/) a day so i would have been liable for the difference if the claim failed, potentially hundreds of pounds. At no point did my insurance company say the handling company had nothing to do with them, they very much gave the impression that it was a different department of my insurance company, very underhand, and when on the phone to the handling company they gave the impression that it was something i had to do, at no point did they say i had a choice and that i would be liable for the car hire if the claim failed. When i had the chance to read up about it, these companies are effectively lending you the money for car hire because you are 'too poor' to pay for it yourself, when for many people this is simply not the case.
It was clear to me that this was a well worked scheme of inflating the prices of repairs and as long as all the insurance companies played ball they would all make good money. We were the losers paying high premiums...

Of interest:
http://www.legalrss.co.uk/Ntegrity/court-guidance-on-road-accident-car-hire-charges

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/9413143/The-credit-hire-price-sting.html

The problem is that most people are simply not aware of the pitfalls of this scam because the majority of people strangely enough are not in the habit of having accidents and are oblivious of this.