Avoid Hastings car insurance !!

ontheroad1970

You can find your own insurance policy covering the cost of an accident if the other driver has an unexpected medical event, such as a heart attack.  Provided he has not been advised not to drive, then a heart attack causing him to lose consciousness and crash will not be down to his negligence, and so therefore there wouldn't be a successful claim against him.

KimJongUn88

Nothing to do with Hastings. Any insurer would adopt the same approach.

Aretnap

Jenni_D said:

Did the other car spontaneously combust? Was it struck by lightning?

If it wasn't set alight by another person (arson), and it wasn't one of the above, how else could it catch fire except due to a fault?

I think the insurance companies have a nice little scam going here.

As above it could have been any number of things; an electrical fault, a leaky fuel line, caused by a manufacturing fault, wear and tear, a minor accident or a mistake by the last mechanic to service it.

And there's the rub. It's not enough for the OP to say "well someone must have been to blame". To reclaim his excess the OP needs to be able to point at a specific person who was negligent (ie failed to take the care expected of a reasonable person) and say "that person should pay for the damage". 

Realistically the only person he could identify would be the driver or the car's owner. However the level of care expected of a reasonable person is not particularly high as far as car maintenance goes. You take your car for an MOT once a year, check obvious visible things like tyres and lights regularly; beyond that you only have to get your car inspected if there's something obviously wrong with it.

If the OP can prove that the owner was driving around a car that smelled strongly of petrol then maybe he has a case, otherwise the driver likely did all that could reasonably be expected of him so he is not liable for the damage caused by the fire. The OP can't say "well he should have done a full electrical safety check and taken the car apart to check the condition of the fuel lines before every journey"; those aren't realistic things to expect of a normal person.

It's not a scam and it's not the fault of insurance companies. It's a basic principle of how liability law works - you can only be held liable for damage to someone else's property if it was something that you could or should have been able to prevent. Ultimately not everything in life is someone's fault, still less the provable fault of an identifiable person. If you want your car to be protected from things that aren't you need to insure it comprehensively yourself. Which the OP has done, and his insurer has honoured its side of the bargain. It's not his insurer's fault that there's no realistic chance of making a recovery from any third party.