Insurance claim

owon

Need a bit of advice regarding a recent claim made against my insurance

May this year I was reversing out of a parking space and I accidently hit the bumper of another car. Upon inspection the other cars bumper was ever so slightly dislodged there was zero damage to the rest of the car and not so much as a scratch on the paint work. 

I asked the driver to send me the bill to avoid affecting my no claims bonus the driver seemed happy with this though his car was a rental so he had to run it past the dealership we took picture and exchanged insurance information

Over the next couple of weeks I kept asking for a price unfortunatly the driver couldnt provide this as the dealership hadnt gave him a price in the end I got fed up and told him just to claim against my insurance

The claim progressed and I got a letter from my insurance company this morning  to say the had paid out the claim however the letter never specified how much they paid the dealership. I thought I might need this information for furture insurance quote therfore I contacted tesco car insurace claims department. I was completely gobsmacked to find out the dealership had been paid a whooping £8000, the car in question was only a Renault Capture and to me I see no justification for paying them such a crazy amount for such minor damage even if the car required a bumper replacement and respray which it didnt it wouldnt have even cost a quater of this

Is there anything I can do about this? I can only assume a claim so large made against my insurance is going to put my insurance cost through the roof

Aretnap

Bumpers are designed to spring back into shape after a bump so there is often little visible damage in a knock like this - but additional damage behind the bumper will often become apparent once it is taken off.

The bill will also include the fee for a hire car while the repairs were going on, potentially at inflated credit hire rates which can often mount up to much more than the repairs themselves.

In any event there isn't much you can do about it. Insurers don't pay out that sort of money for fun. They will have judged that the claim was reasonable in the circumstances and that if they tried to resist paying they would likely have ended up losing in court and being left with an even larger bill. To agree to let them make this judgement when you take out the policy.

The good news is that whether the claim is for £50 or £8000 generally makes little difference to your future premiums - most insurers just treat a claim as a claim and if you go direct through their website rather than through the comparison sites you will find that many don't even ask the amount. 

GrumpyDil

Although OP says it was a rental so possible a claim for loss of profit for the time it was being repaired as well. 

DullGreyGuy

GrumpyDil said:

Although OP says it was a rental so possible a claim for loss of profit for the time it was being repaired as well. 

It would instead rather than as well, they can't claim for a replacement vehicle and claim for not having the vehicle. 


You could ask your insurer to provide a breakdown if you are interested. Unless they made a global offer it should be broken down by heads of claim. However for 99% of insurers it will make no difference at all if they paid out £80, £8,000 or £800,000. They're concerned about the quality of your driving which the fault claim will give them an indication of, the value of the claim is much more a function of what you hit which doesn't really comment on your driving at all.