Car insurance - value of identical car!

fatbadger2

Hi - My car was stolen (Mini, 2002) and the insurance company say it is valued at £2200 based on Autotrade - but those ones look like dodgy back street garages to me, and are not at the same high spec. My car was 1 owner in mint condition and had leather heated seats (very rare). Do they have to take that into consideration, or will any old Mini of similar mileage and year do?
Thanks :money:

Also, can I insist that the car I replace it with is not located at the other end of the country?? (Or claim the cost of transporting it? Although I wouldn't want to buy a car I hadn't inspected anyway... never trust garages)

glentoran99

How much do you think your car is worth? and can you provide evidence to the insurance company

maddogb

depends on how much bottle you have..
Personally I am amazed they have offered you this much I was offered only £800 more for a 2009 car, admittedly not the trendy mini but a good clean 1 keeper, car with comparatively low mileage

PlymouthMaid

They are supposed to put you in the same position you were in before the incident. If i were you I would find an example of a car like yours and point the differences out to them. I had this years ago when my pc was stolen and they tried to fob me off with the cost of a much lower spec one.

maddogb

PlymouthMaid wrote: »

They are supposed to put you in the same position you were in before the incident. If i were you I would find an example of a car like yours and point the differences out to them. I had this years ago when my pc was stolen and they tried to fob me off with the cost of a much lower spec one.

unfortunately seeing as the FOS say they don't give any weight to "adverts" a lot of insurers have a cop out not to accept this form of "evidence" and refuse to do so, Esure certainly didn't want to see any when I offered.

k3lvc

PlymouthMaid wrote: »

They are supposed to put you in the same position you were in before the incident.

Are they ? Is this what the T&C's of the policy say or is this what you'd like to think ?

fatbadger2

Thanks. I don't think they have to put me in a position i was in before - i think that applies to if I was suing someone (no point, he's a scallywag).

From reading adverts on Autotrader it seems to me that 2800 would be more reasonable: becasue to get low number of previous keepers + full service history + leather = quite rare and more expensive. Is that a reasonable argument?

Quentin

Remember autotrader ads asking prices don't equate to market value as they are inflated.

Buyers always expect a discount/offers

Aretnap

Here's how it should work

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

Some points to note:

Yes, it should be the price the car would have sold for from a reputable dealer just before the accident.

Adverts are not generally considered very persuasive when it comes to valuing cars - the fact that someone advertises a car for £3000 doesn't mean that it will actually sell for £3000. The trade guides, which are based on actual selling prices, carry more weight.

If the car had high spec trim or was in unusually good condition that's something they should take into account. However you might need some evidence (like an engineers report) to show that it was in unusually good condition - everybody claims that their car was in excellent condition, they can't all be right.

Market value can be a rather notional concept - if you have a rare car or at least rare trim style it may be that there isn't one with the same age, trim, mileage etc for sale anywhere, in which case the value is inevitably a best guess as to what yours might have sold for. And the insurer's duty is to pay the market value, not to find you an actual replacement car, which means you can't claim for things like transport costs if there doesn't happen to be one for sale locally at a good price.

maddogb

k3lvc wrote: »

Are they ? Is this what the T&C's of the policy say or is this what you'd like to think ?

it is a well known fact many insurance policies are needlessly complicated, but anyway a policy doesn't need to say that, it's called an "implied term"

maddogb

Quentin wrote: »

Remember autotrader ads asking prices don't equate to market value as they are inflated.

Buyers always expect a discount/offers

yes but they don't always get them, I'm beginning to think this is a bit of an urban myth propagated by insurers, after all who is going to advertise a car at over the cost of competitors just in case a discount is asked for, doesn't seem good business sense at all.