Damage to Car (with pics) - Insurance Advice

united4ever

Wife had a scrape at the weekend:

Never done this before. We have fully comp with LV. So before I commit to ringing them I wanted to be sure this is the right approach.

My first thought was just take it to a local garage and get it repaired outside insurance for a few hundred. Not too bothered about the scratches myself (wife is though) but obviously want the plastic tyre guard (what's its called?) replacing.

Garage quoted £1300 retail price, said if I decide to go down insurance route let them know.

He said there is a dent but I struggled to see it and that the scratches will need repainting (fair enough).

LV excess is £350 and I think that we can pay an extra £200 if we want to use one of their non-preferred garages.

Anyway, would you agree that Insurance is the right route here, just pay £350 and go with their preferred garage and get the lot done (scratches and all).

Got a 9 year no claims at the moment so I will lose this. What am I looking at at my next renewal. We are both in 40s and its a Nissan Juke. Paid £230 for fully comp - are we looking at double next time? Anyway - surely cheaper than £1300.

Here is the 'good' side of the car by the way:

I hope to run the car until it's on its last legs so not selling any time soon.

EssexExile

Your LV= documentation will tell you how much NCB you will lose, my copy says it will drop from 80% to 72% assuming it's not protected. I make it £322 next time, but check my maths! Of course it may go up more than that (or less).

We used LV='s recommended repairer and they were fine - eventually.

Goudy

It's hard to tell with the scratches and it depends on how bothered you/your wife are.

Scrapes like this usually look worse than they are when they are fresh, but you might be able to polish a lot of them out with some cutting compound and elbow grease, so it might be worth trying that first and see what is looks like before you make up your mind.

A decent used wheel arch trim can be had for around £30 and a new one could be had for less than £50.
A set of clips to fit it is around £8.

Bigphil1474

Agree with Goudy, get it fixed on the cheap, a bit of polish, and take your wife out for a nice meal on the money you've saved.
On the insurance, it's not just year 1 that you'll pay more, it'll probably affect premiums to some degree for a few years, so will likely cost more than the £350.

DullGreyGuy

First of all, what did you scrape against? Was there any damage to it?

EssexExile said:

Your LV= documentation will tell you how much NCB you will lose, my copy says it will drop from 80% to 72% assuming it's not protected. I make it £322 next time, but check my maths! Of course it may go up more than that (or less).

Certainly worth checking the policy and what it says, most dont disclose what discount you actually get but will just say you'll drop from 9 to 7 or 3 (most common options) upon a single fault claim. 

Haven't checked your maths for correcting for the reduced NCD but a fault claim will certainly increase the underlying premium and so ignoring market pressures, inflation etc the insurance would increase by more than just the NCD change. 

united4ever

Based on the below table the NCD at my next renewal would be 3 years then? (It was actually 8 years NCD I have).

So that means at the end of this insurance term I can say I have 3 years NCD (and LV will provide documentation to support this)?

That's better than I thought, I assumed it goes down to zero for any claim. You say though that the premium will go up more than an identical driver who had 3 years NCD but no fault claim in the last year (as per small print below the table). It's a bit of an unknown value isn't it. Policy runs until January so I guess we wouldn't know the true impact until then and, of course the subsequent years.

The car scraped a pole by the roadside (I wasn't there but am told there is no damage).

Thanks

GrumpyDil

Might be worthwhile thinking about protecting your NCD in future. 

I haven't done the calcs on whether it is worth it but it only added about 30 when I got my 21 year old daughter to add it to her insurance as soon as she could. 

DullGreyGuy

united4ever said

That's better than I thought, I assumed it goes down to zero for any claim.

No, for Motor NCD is a fairly established thing and most insurers follow the same basic rules. If you think of the name it makes no sense but then nor does NCDP etc but selling insurance on insurance is just too good an idea to give up on. 

In other classes, such as Home, it's much more basic and more divergent in nature. The majority simply price on a combination of "how many years have you held insurance", "How many claims in the last 5 years" which you could proxy to a "no claims discount" but more basic than Motor which considers fault etc.

In commercial policies arguably NCDs make more sense, you pay a price up front based on your history etc and if you are claims free for the year you get a rebate (normally 10%) after a period of time (normally beyond the end of the policy because of the lag of claims being lodged)

Goudy

The insurance total you pay is worked out by the premium minus the discount.
Having a claim not only effects your NCD but also your premium.

For example, your total this year might have been £1000 with a NCD of 60%, so you paid £400.
With a claim your premium may go up to say £1300 and you lose some NCD, so now it's only 40% discount, so you pay £780.
You may only lose 20% discount but the total you may have to pay has nearly doubled.

You can't work out what you would pay just based on whatever NCD you would lose, you would need to know what the premium would be with a claim and the revised NCD.

Insurance underwriters will load your premium to some extent for 5 years for a claim, so you will pay for it until your claim comes off your record and (if) you recover your NCD over the next few years.

Of course it's now common to pay to protect your NCD but you can't protect the premium, that can always change.

You would also need to factor in your policy excess if you have any hope of roughly working out what the overall cost of a claim might be.
You will always pay the first X amount of any claim.
If it's a non fault claim, it can be claimed back from the other party that is at fault but if it's a fault claim, like this one, you can't so you would have to pay it.
(if your insurance is an All Sections Excess policy, you will pay it no matter what, and on every section claimed against)

Excess is usually in two parts, voluntary and compulsory.
Usually it's a couple of hundred pounds in each, but some policies can ramp it up to try and make it a competitive quote, so it's worth checking that as well. 

united4ever

Goudy said:

It's hard to tell with the scratches and it depends on how bothered you/your wife are.

Scrapes like this usually look worse than they are when they are fresh, but you might be able to polish a lot of them out with some cutting compound and elbow grease, so it might be worth trying that first and see what is looks like before you make up your mind.

A decent used wheel arch trim can be had for around £30 and a new one could be had for less than £50.
A set of clips to fit it is around £8.

How easy is it to do for an absolute novice if I bought a used wheel arch trim myself?

Goudy

Youtube has a couple of videos on how to fit the wheel arch trims.
Nissan Juke Fender Trim Repair Clips - YouTube

They are basically pop on with plastic clips.
It looks like you may have lost these clips with the old wheel arch trim but you can buy a full set on Ebay for around £5 to £7.

Just fit the right clip to the right spot on the inside of the new wheel arch trim, line the trim up with the holes in the body and push them in.

For the scratches, wash it off and try a cutting compound or scratch remover first.
Something like G3 Scratch Remover paste that is available from Halfords.

Once you have done a couple of passes with the scratch remover and got the bulk of it out, try a colour match polish like T Cut Black (I presume it's black?).
That will help fill in the scratches with some colour.