To sue or not to sue?

glentoran99

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-1620392/Beware-insurer-tricks-on-car-write-offs.html


The rules for dealing with written-off cars are clear. Industry body the Association Of British Insurers says car insurance companies must offer you a proper payout for the value of your car.
This means you must be offered a sum that will allow you to buy a similar car in a similar condition in your local area. All the insurer should deduct is the excess you agreed to when taking the policy.

dacouch

glentoran99 wrote: »

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-1620392/Beware-insurer-tricks-on-car-write-offs.html


The rules for dealing with written-off cars are clear. Industry body the Association Of British Insurers says car insurance companies must offer you a proper payout for the value of your car.
This means you must be offered a sum that will allow you to buy a similar car in a similar condition in your local area. All the insurer should deduct is the excess you agreed to when taking the policy.

That is a weird article.

I do not believe there are any guidelines on valuing a car by the ABI, I think they have asked a press officer a question on valuing a total loss and that extended that to be guidelines.

There are many Insurers who are not members of the ABI eg many Lloyd's members so any guidelines from the ABI would not be relevant to them.

Your previous post points RK at the third parties Insurers, but as a third party eg no contract between them and the OP they could ignore the ABI's guidelines when valuing a car

IamNotAllowedToUseMyName

Having established that the car is straight financed, they should seek an identical car, or as similar as possible with identifiable differences in value. If they cannot purchase it at the offer price, they should approach the insurers and ask them either to negotiate on their behalf or provide the funds to allow it to be purchased. Clearly, if the insurers are not providing the funds to replace the car like for like then they are not meeting the terms of the insurance.

IamNotAllowedToUseMyName

martinsurrey wrote: »

Not a tricky one at all, OP lost a car worth £6k and will get £6k back. How they financed the car is irrelevant

Civil claims are not to punish people they are restorative, if the OP gets £7.5k back they will be in a better position than they were before the fire, as they could buy a similar car AND clear the finance, which is betterment.

OP you wont get any more than the cars worth, negligence or not.

you are right about a hire car in the meantime though.

My principle is that if this were a PCP deal, I would presume that the deal had been terminated and the debtor would be obliged to pay off the finance at that point - there is now no car to secure the outstanding debt.

At that point in time, the debtor is obviously financially worse off, they have no car and an outstanding debt. They can point to a £1.5k hole in their bank account that would not have been there if it had not been for the accident.

I liken this to my argument when a pot of paint was spilt over my carpet by a decorator. The insurers tried to argue for betterment. I made it clear that I did not accept I was in a better position - I had a perfectly carpeted room and wanted a perfectly carpeted room in its place. The fact that the carpet was newer was irrelevant, for ever and a day I would have been £1000 poorer because of someone's negligence.

In this case, someone might have made a perfectly reasonable decision to finance a car by PCP and due to know fault of their own they have been put into debt. Now, there may be better ways to resolve this, but it is not a reasonable result to be put into debt due to someone's negligence. The least that should be done to put the person onto an equal footing as before the accident is to finance the debt. The other element of the worsening position is potentially being forced into a new PCP deal, which as we know would require a longer contract and a deposit. So this is why I think in the case of PCP it is tricky, because you cannot simply assess the position in terms of the value of the car, it is also a collection of reasonable contractual obligations that have been broken or may need to be taken on to restore the car user's position to as similar as possible.

It raises the question as to what would have happened with a pure lease car and there was a gap between what the insurers were prepared to pay out and what the lender would accept. Who would you consider liable for the gap if there was no gap insurance - is it reasonable for someone who leases a car to be put into debt because of someone's negligence?