Vandalism to car.. Insurance company put it as a 'fault claim'..

C0nfused

Hi..


This is just a question out of interest now, as its probably too late for me to do anything about it.


In January, I parked my car in a pub car park, that had CCTV, for an hour whilst my husband and I had a meal. The car was perfectly fine when we drove in. When we returned to the car, it was dark and due to where we were parked we approached the car from the back. We got in and I drove round to a friends, where I happened to park under a street light. When I got out of the car I noticed something was odd about the bonnet, and that was when I spotted that the bonnet and wing had been severely dented and the plastic around the windscreen wipers was smashed up.. I then noticed that the panel above the door on the drivers side was dented. The weather had been particularly windy and I knew that the damage couldn't have happened whilst I was driving without me noticing and there was no way it could have happened before we went to the pub as both myself and my husband would have seen it. It therefore only could have happened at the pub. Due to the weather our initial thoughts were that a branch from the tree had landed on it, it seemed a logical cause to the damage. We returned to the pub car park (with the expectation to find a branch where I was parked and to see damage to the tree we were parked under). There was nothing. We asked at the pub for them to review their CCTV, which the following day came back with nothing, they could only see the back of my car and as it wasn't lit, they couldn't see anything. There is no way that the damage could have been caused by another vehicle because of where we were parked. That left one cause to the damage.. someone with something heavy vandalising the car for whatever reason..


We reported it to the police and I claimed on my car insurance. As there was no CCTV the car insurance people listed it as a fault claim.. When I told the police officer that contacted me about the incident, they couldn't understand this either..


Due to other things going on, I didn't have the energy to argue, it was particularly nerve wracking as the repair centre who assessed the damage had to refer back to the insurers so I had to wait to see if they were going to write off the car due to the damage..


Now things have got easier, I'm thinking about it and I'm so cross that I'm going to have to pay higher premiums due to this incident. My no claims is protected but this is now one strike against this too..


Just looking for thoughts really, I know I can't go back and argue with them now.. just for future reference really (plus thinking ahead of renewal, do I really want to be with a company that treat vandalism as the owners fault...)....

rs65

C0nfused wrote: »

do I really want to be with a company that treat vandalism as the owners fault...)....

Its pretty normal. It just means they have an unrecovered outlay. Non-fault is where they have got their outlay back from another party.

Nearlyold

Non fault is used where your insurance company can recover their claim costs from the another party because the other party was at fault.

As there is no other party your insurance company can recover their costs from it counts as a fault claim.

C0nfused

Thank you.. that makes sense..