Category D Car Misold

Joe_Horner

Hayles2127 wrote: »

[...]Surely it is not rectified by just wiping its history, so the car is worth its value of £5500-£6000 again. I certainly would not be happy to sell this car on knowing it has had an accident and its category removed.

I think you may be misunderstanding what a cat D marker means.

Many cars have had accident damage that's repaired under insurance but never "categorised". In those cases there's no way anyone will ever know about the repairs if they're done to an acceptable standard. Any time you buy a car there's a good chance that'll be the case, so the plain fact it's been in an accident shouldn't affect selling (or buying) it.

When cars acquire a marker, the type of marker varied depending on the reason:

Cat C is damaged "beyond economic repair". This is the case where there's damage that would cost a significant amount of the car's value to repair. Effectively, if the cost of the repair is more than the (repaired) car will be worth then it's classed as a cat C.

Cat D is for cases where a total loss is recorded (ie: the insurers pay out the replacement value) for some other reason. In other words, a cat D car will not usually have had significant damage in relation to the value of the car. These reasons can include things like:

• Delays in getting parts, which increase the total cost of the claim because of hire charges etc. This could be as minor as a cracked bumper that's going to take a month or two to supply.
• Stolen and recovered (even undamaged) where the insurers have already paid out before it's recovered - so no damage at all.

Effectively, it's the same as an uncategorised car except that there's been an administrative decision to pay out in full for either speed or because they already have.

But cat D won't normally include significant damage (in relation to the value of the car at the time) because that would make it a cat C.

If the insurers were offering to remove a cat C marker then that might be grounds for a few raised eyebrows, but cat D is raised by a purely administrative decision to pay out and, if they're willing to change their mind and remove it, then it's really not an issue because it has no bearing at all on how severe the damage was.

londonTiger

bigjl wrote: »

Rules?

What rules?

you quite clearly missed the bit where the op said they spoke to insurance that half placed the cat d marker on the car allowing it to show as cat d clear on some records and catd on others.

insurer has decided to remove the cat d marker

Wonder if the same insurer would do this if the owner did a fully certified repair and went back to insurer and remove the catd marker.