Insurance claim dilemma

JRCov87

Hi all, I have a dilemma.

Parked my car a few months ago next to a skip. It appears the skip was collected whilst I was away from my car and rubble has dropped and caused damage to the roof. Skip company didn’t tell me and promptly left without leaving their details.

I was going to pay to repair the damage myself, as the car is a lease vehicle and didn’t want them to charge me for the repairs. However, the company I assigned to carry out the repair can no longer do it, and the car is due to go back in a week’s time.

Should I claim for the accidental damage through insurance, or return the vehicle and take the hit on the cost of the repairs (estimated around £1500-£2000).

Thanks.

paul_c123

You'd need to do some kind of calculation to see which one makes you least worse off. You have your excess, and any other costs associated with having a "claim" on your file and possibly losing NCB, which you can only roughly estimate. Also I doubt it can be done within a week, you might have to pay for a "missed collection" and/or a time extension on the lease due to this. It is worth pursuing the skip company for the losses though.

Car_54

I would claim on my insurance: otherwise, what am I paying them for? Let them do the work of chasing the skip company.

The complicating factor is the lease expiry. Speak to the lease company: it's something they must deal with daily.

PTP123

Do you have any evidence of the skip company being responsible? Ring door camera footage etc?

JRCov87

thanks guys. No, unknown who the skip company are. Location not covered by any cameras and it happened a few months ago.

Excess for accidental damage is £250 which is a lot less, but it’s the knock-on cost of future policies like you say.

Think I’ll sound out the lease company

paul_c123

Does the damage cover more than 30% of the roof? This is the criteria a lot of lease firms use to assess whether its "dent repair" (£26-190) or "complete panel repair/replace" (obviously in this case, its not like a bumper or door where its easy to replace it), which could run to thousands.

MyRealNameToo

With an unknown third party its likely to be considered a fault claim. Obviously if you arent wanting to commit fraud it needs declaring if you claim for it or not and so the delta isnt from claiming -v- a clean record but the difference between a claimed for fault accident and unclaimed for fault accident. In reality many are willing to commit fraud by "forgetting" to declare the damage if they didnt claim.

Pricing is normally done as a proportional basis so a claim doesnt add £300 to premiums but may add 50% and so the financial impact will be much more if you were paying £1,500 a year before the accident than if you were paying £400 before the accident in absolute terms.

Insurers can also link rating factors so a teenager driver having a fault accident may get a 75% premium loading whereas as a 40 year old person a 40% and thats ontop of the fact the teenager is already paying more because of their age

TooManyPoints

Did you tell your insurers about this when it occurred?

JRCov87

thanks again. No, didn’t tell insurance at the time it occurred as I had planned to repair it myself to save the hassle of an insurance claim and possibility of being penalised in the long run.

One factor to also consider is that the insurance is included with the vehicle lease (salary sacrifice through work).

The only reason I’m considering it now is because the dent repair company I was booked in to use basically screwed me. I booked it in ages ago to have it repaired, their suggestion was to leave it closer to the return date to do it, not sure why. Anyway I brought the car to them last week to repair, at which point they said he couldn’t do it as they needed more time and could only rebook it for next month (car due to be exchanged next week for my new one).

Also it was more work than he’d quoted for so would have to charge more. Suffice to say i told him to stick it. I’ve spoken to a couple of other repair companies who basically said it would be at least twice what this guy quoted.

The damage it not necessarily large in percentage but it is bad. It’s as if a load of stones have landed on the car from height and scratched and dented in about 10 spots (which is what actually did happen). I only noticed the day after. They’d clearly cleaned it up before driving off. That’s by-the-by, I’ll never find who it was.

I’ve never done a damage only claim, so would they give you the choice to consider it before claiming or just put it through the minute you notify them?

paul_c123

I would just leave it and let the lease collection guy spot it (he/she might even miss it - they sometimes forget to check the roof because damage is unusual there). Also, DON'T wash your car - it will hide damage better. I believe the max deduction for dents with paint damage is about £200 anyway.

JRCov87

cheers, but if he doesn’t spot the damage I think he’ll be losing his job. Only way he won’t see it is if he’s 3ft tall and can’t see the roof.