My written off car still on the road

[MarkBarl]

Just wondered what others thought of this.
Someone drove into the front corner of my car in Dec '14. As it damaged the suspension, the garage my insurance used wrote the car off. (Not the organisation that became the owner of the car) Insurance pays out OK and I have had to get another car. Not the same as my old one (Zafira B) as I couldn't find one at the right price.

Fast forward a year and on a whim I look up my old car on the DVLA site to find it is still on the road and has had continuous Tax since I had it. OK so it's a class C or D write off now but I still felt a bit peeved that they were so quick to write it off when it obviously could be fixed.

 

[alan333]

Insurance generally use reputable repair shops with high overheads and new parts. However smaller places, or anyone really, can do the job cheaper or fit used parts. I believe they use some form of rules regarding the car's value against it's repair cost, like if the repair cost is more than so many percent of the car's value they write it off.

To give an example let's say a car is worth £8000, but needs a similar repair to yours (and obviously I'm guessing here since I don't know what your damage was) - perhaps new suspension would be £1000, a couple of lights £500, a bumper £500, maybe a wheel and tyre £500, some other body panels £500, plus the labour and paint at another £2000. The total cost fairly adds up (to £5000 in my glib example).

On the flip side of the coin, they sell the car (as a cat C or D repairable) for £4000, then they pay you £8000 to buy your replacement...then their total cost is £4000, ie a grand less than fixing it.

Now the guy who bought it gets some parts from the scrappy and fixes it himself at home for £1500. He ends up with a car worth £8000 (ok it's only worth £6500 now since it's Cat C or D), but it only cost him £5500.

 

[jockscott]

Depends what sort of write off it was. Insurance companies often "write off" vehicles as, "uneconomical to repair" , meaning they don't want to pay out the cost of repairs (we all know garages charge an extortionate amount for "joe public" repairs) However these same garages may well buy in insurance write offs at a low price, then repair them to sell on, making themselves a nice profit .

 

[Himaginn]

Category C and D are repairable write-offs. category A and B are not repairable. For more info':

http://www.rac.co.uk/community/blog/rac-blog/september-2011/what-is-an-insurance-write-off

 

[gregers]

asabove,if you were quick enough you couldve bought it back from your insurance company.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I'm driving a Cat D write-off. Got a very minor scrape - the sort of thing people used to repair with a bit of cellulose putty and an aerosol - absolutely no structural damage, not even a dented panel, but a 13-yr old car, metallic paint... The sort of prices charged by the sort of places insurance companies use made the repair uneconomical. They paid me the salvage value and I kept the car.

 

[Avocet]

My last-but-one car was a cat D write-off. Busted headlight. Car was only worth about £400. Headlight about £200, so it was written off.

 

[Hugh Jaleak]

Surprising what does get put back on the road sometimes. I had a Skoda Favorit, think it was 1998. It got a serious side impact after a Muppet showing off to his mate lost control and slammed into the side of it. Due to level of damage, (car was undriveable with rear O/S quarter all smashed in), had to be recovered from the scene, and the last I saw of it was at the Services at J15 of the M1 sitting in the recovery company's compound, when I retrieved the rest of my stuff from it. Cornhill insurance wrote it off and I bought another jalopy for getting to and from work.

Fast forward to 2003, I get a letter from the London Borough of Newham, 'my' car has been dumped in a Council owned car park, they've impounded it and want recovery and storage charges, with threat of legal action if I dont pay up! I got straight onto Cornhill, who took the matter over, but in the letter sent to Newham, Cornhill advised them the vehicle had been a total loss and as far as they were concerned had been disposed of via a salvage operator in Birmingham...

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Fast forward to 2003, I get a letter from the London Borough of Newham, 'my' car has been dumped in a Council owned car park, they've impounded it and want recovery and storage charges, with threat of legal action if I dont pay up!

I think I would have enjoyed, had it been me, totally ignoring all such correspondence and waiting to see what happened next.

 

[Hugh Jaleak]

In hindsight I would have liked to have seen the car, If someone had put it back on the road, what sort of shed it was at that point! At the time though it was more shock, I just went straight round to the insurance broker who dealt with my insurance back then and left them to deal with it!

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Yeah - I know that's the obvious, and most sensible thing to do.

But.....

 

[Hyper88]

alan333 is quite right about insurance wishing to write-off the car.

The same thing happened to me when insured with Elephant.co.uk

If the insurance company says a car is a write off, 'some' insurance companies will cancel the insurance policy, and keep ALL 12 months of the insurance premium. My accident happened about 5 or 6 months into the policy. So effictively, I was loosing £250 worth of insurance, plus my policy excess was £350. Plus they keep my car.

Some insurance companies like Aviva are much better, as they will carry the remainder of your insurance to your new car.

Elephant.co.uk treated me badly, by cancelling the insurance, I was not even able to drive my father's car (on third party basis), so had no means to get about to look for a new car. Plus, I was not even able to drive the car, to another garage to get quotes.

I decided to get the car repaired myself, withdraw the claim. They even said I had to get a new MOT! Even though I had garage bills for the repair.

The whole point of the excess is the 'maximum' you will loose is £350.

I rang the Financial Ombusdman, but their advice was on the insurance company side.

I certainly felt the business practices of Elephant.co.uk were crooked.

Advice: Always read the policy! Forget comparison web sites!

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I was with Ageas through the AA, and they were quite happy to continue insuring the car, and me to continue to use it.

Come renewal (automatic if I do nothing), I thought I ought to check what they consider the car is now "worth" (£0 was my guess), and therefore see what the point was of continuing with FC, and if TPF&T made more sense, or even TP only if fire or theft would pay me nothing. And I did get round to raising the issue with them about a week before it was due.

At which point, despite the fact that it was they who wrote it off, and despite the fact that the renewal documents showed it as a Cat D, they said "Oh, it's a Cat D write-off. No, we won't insure that, your insurance will lapse on...."

Bit of back-and-forth re the fact that I had "repaired" the car myself (colour restoring polish did a 90% good enough job), and the fact that it had passed an MOT since the accident, but to no avail.

After some BAF behaviour, and via a specialist broker (comparison sites are useless for this sort of thing) I got insurance (at a significantly lower price that Ageas wanted for the renewal), and life goes on.

I do wonder what would have happened if I had done nothing, and let them take the money - if an incident occurred, would they have decided to cancel my insurance and leave me uninsured?