Challenging car insurers valuation

B0bbyEwing

Car is going to be written off. Insurers have given a price for it. £900

Looking on auto trader & ebay, there's a few cars that are at this price and slightly lower (say £750) but there's also a good number that are higher (£1300-£1400) and yes for same age & similar mileage.

Is it possible to challenge their valuation & if so how do you go about it? 

And if you can provide listings where others are advertising for more then what's the chances of getting anywhere with challenging them? Reasonable chance or do they generally not budge? 

sheramber

What a car is advertised at is not the same as what they actually get for it.

Isthisforreal99

You need compelling evidence that the market value is more than you have been offered. Remember these adverts you see are asking prices not selling prices - you would expect to knock something off those asking prices, they are probably ono?

MyRealNameToo

B0bbyEwing said:

Car is going to be written off. Insurers have given a price for it. £900

Looking on auto trader & ebay, there's a few cars that are at this price and slightly lower (say £750) but there's also a good number that are higher (£1300-£1400) and yes for same age & similar mileage.

Is it possible to challenge their valuation & if so how do you go about it? 

And if you can provide listings where others are advertising for more then what's the chances of getting anywhere with challenging them? Reasonable chance or do they generally not budge? 

The FOS generally expects them to use a range of vehicle valuing tools like Glass, CAP etc, if they are all generally the same then thats ok but if their is one wildly different then it should be ignored. 

These tools are motor industry in nature but used in insurance and finance too and are based on real sales. As such they are considered fairly reliable with data sets large enough to remove outliers.

FOS doesnt put much weighting on adverts, these are ultimately unregulated and someone can list a sale for a stupid price. Importantly advertised price <> sales price. So someone could list your vehicle for £4k but it's just never going to sell.

They point out generally it's about proving why the books would be wrong which generally because the vehicle is very rare (PS. the books used to be books, these days they are software but still referred to as "book price" etc) 

B0bbyEwing

So in short you get what you're given & that's the end of it. 

As it turns out, it's not 900 at all. OH misheard them as she thought that was with the excess off. It wasn't. It's 800 with the excess off.

Another annoying one is they deducted a further fee for a scuff to the rear of the car. 

I don't understand that. It's not like WBAC where it's going to be sold on. Why deduct for extra damage? And why stop there? Why not deduct for every stone chip & minor blemish? It's literally just a scuff on a corner. 


And I totally get that asking price isn't sale price. I also get that you'd expect to knock them down but enough folk are selling in the 1300-1400 range. Even if you knock them down to 1000, that's more than 800.

Oh and they said they pulled their info from 3 sites. 2 were similar & the other was considerably cheaper so they took an average. 

MyRealNameToo

B0bbyEwing said:

So in short you get what you're given & that's the end of it. 

As it turns out, it's not 900 at all. OH misheard them as she thought that was with the excess off. It wasn't. It's 800 with the excess off.

Another annoying one is they deducted a further fee for a scuff to the rear of the car. 

I don't understand that. It's not like WBAC where it's going to be sold on. Why deduct for extra damage? And why stop there? Why not deduct for every stone chip & minor blemish? It's literally just a scuff on a corner. 


And I totally get that asking price isn't sale price. I also get that you'd expect to knock them down but enough folk are selling in the 1300-1400 range. Even if you knock them down to 1000, that's more than 800.

Oh and they said they pulled their info from 3 sites. 2 were similar & the other was considerably cheaper so they took an average. 

Their obligation is to give you the money you could have sold the car for immediately before the accident less your uninsured excess. 

In principle they should deduct for every dent, stone chip etc but generally very minor issues get lumped together into a general condition consideration and only modest damage and above is explicitly deducted. This is typically done as a percentage of what it would have cost to fix as generally people under estimate the repair costs so pay too much for the car. 

£800 is less your excess, you have to add your excess back on and compare that total to the average sale price. You choose to have an uninsured element in the form of an excess, you could have paid more premium and had a £0 excess.

mebu60

MyRealNameToo said:

Their obligation is to give you the money you could have sold the car for immediately before the accident less your uninsured excess. 

Is it? My expectation in such circumstances would be that they put me back in the position I was in before the accident, i.e. pay me sufficient (minus any excess) to buy an equivalent vehicle from a reputable dealer. What I could sell it for, even privately let alone to buyers of used vehicles, would be less than it would cost me to buy it (unless I chanced upon a private sale). 

facade

mebu60 said:

MyRealNameToo said:

Their obligation is to give you the money you could have sold the car for immediately before the accident less your uninsured excess. 

Is it? My expectation in such circumstances would be that they put me back in the position I was in before the accident, i.e. pay me sufficient (minus any excess) to buy an equivalent vehicle from a reputable dealer. What I could sell it for, even privately let alone to buyers of used vehicles, would be less than it would cost me to buy it (unless I chanced upon a private sale). 

They put you back in the position that you were in- you had an asset worth £900, they give you the £900 that it was worth. In practical terms you can never replace the car from a dealer with what they pay out, because you have to pay an extra profit margin to a dealer above what the car is actually worth.

Say you had a Mk1 Fiat Strada in good nick and write it off, they just pay you what it was worth = what you could have sold it for, they don't have to buy you another one. (How many Fiat Stradas are for sale.....)

Mildly_Miffed

Nobody is buying cars for a grand from a dealer. It would be silly to even think about doing it.
No dealer worth buying a mars bar from would even contemplate that end of the market.

If you're seeing ads for similar cars for £750-£1300, I'd say £900 is a fair payout. They might bung you another hundred or two if you make a right nuisance of yourself, but...

B0bbyEwing

So you're saying that no dealer deals in cars around the £1k area? 

Are you from London by any chance where everything is ridiculously priced anyway? 

I've bought in and around that from dealers where the car has lasted a good number of years. 

Anyway as for the insurance, there's a few points been made that's good to know now so thanks for those. 

As for this case, it's out of my hands & dealt with, unfortunately. 

I've taken a few bits & bobs out which I'll sell on. Nothing major. 

Apparently it's no longer insured so they say & they specifically said it is not to be driven. 

Well since it's not to be driven, I'm part way tempted to take the battery out since it still has a years warranty on it. Then they can sort the removal of it without driving it since it's not to be driven. 

Car_54

B0bbyEwing said:

Well since it's not to be driven, I'm part way tempted to take the battery out since it still has a years warranty on it. Then they can sort the removal of it without driving it since it's not to be driven. 

They mean YOU can't drive it, as it's no longer insured. Whoever collects it will be able to drive it on trade insurance.