Insurance, vehicle value and expensive repairs

DullGreyGuy

mbrijun said:

tacpot12 said:

The likelihood of it being written off, if she has an accident, is very high. But you can provide receipts for parts you have replaced recently to the insurer and hope that they recognise that the market value of the car is higher than average.

That's my hope, but I recently read that insurers are routinely underpaying drivers, and many of them have to go to the Ombudsman as a result.

The ombudsman sides with the customer in about 29% of cases for Motor Claims and so clearly it's more a case of customers over estimating the value of their car than the insurer underpaying. 

If you can show you have recently had work done on the vehicle it may marginally increase the value of the vehicle but its not going to be close to adding the cost of the works onto the value of the vehicle. Cars, ignoring the blip during Covid are depreciating assets, optional extras, customisation, repairs does little to boost value. 

As to what you do, you either pay for the repairs because the cars are good runners and hope that you dont get into any accidents or decide they've got into the stage of being a money pit and dump them to get something that'll last a few more years. There is no way to get it such that a £5k repair adds £5k of value.