Vehicle Salvage Value

Fishmarket

Our car was driven into resulting in a no-fault claim. We want to retain the car and have to pay the salvage value to the insurer.

We disagreed with the initial offer for the vehicle value and the insurance company has agreed to increase this. This comes with a corresponding increase in the salvage value which seems to be 25% of the vehicle value.

How do we know if the salvage value is a fair one?

stator

Phone up a local car breakers and ask how much they would pay?

Look on ebay for the same car marked "spares or repair" and click the box for "completed auctions" to see how much people paid for similar.

OnanTheBarbarian

What is the pre-accident value of the car?

Fishmarket

Thanks Stator. We found that breakers couldn't really help with this. We also asked a claims department. They said that their engineers look at the nature and extent of the damage in order to decide on the salvage value.

OTB: I asked a local garage owner who suggested £1800. Our insurers initially offered £1800 with a salvage value of £343.5. We found some adverts for similar cars with prices well above £2000. We emailed these to the insurers and asked for a revised price of £2200. They agreed but upped the salvage price to £550. On checking the adverts we had found, one of these was for a lower spec car. We removed this and asked for £2400 (which as well below the adverts average). Our insurers agreed but again upped the salvage price to £600.

If we now accept, we effectively get £1800 and keep the car. To us it seems that these 'variable' salvage values are a way for the insurance companies to save money on contested claims rather than reflect a fair salvage value.

dacouch

If your car is worth more pre accident, then the salvage value will also increase.

It's worth noting that adverts for cars are not regarded as an accurate indication of the value of a car as they're regarded at the price the seller is prepared to start negotiating downwards from.

OnanTheBarbarian

On cars worth less than £3k my experience from instructing many hundreds of independent engineer reports on written off vehicles is a salvage value of 10% of pre-accident value.

Trouble is that insurers have excellent salvage rates agreed with their salvage networks, so they will argue the value they assign is the value they could achieve if they retained the salvage.

Give them the 10% argument though.