To think that a courtesy car should not be a hidden credit hire car

Agreed

But belt and braces

This way you have put in writing that you no longer accept the document

Because a car is repaired to the same standard regardless of age and so costs substantially more to repair than the garage down the road. Your 300 quid Peugeot 106 may not need to be fixed to the same standard as a 30000 BMW but the insurance treats them equally. Therefore, they will say it's simply not worth paying those prices to repair the Peugeot and so it becomes an economic write off. Likely a CAT N with no structural damage that the garage down the road can T-cut. That's why some people don't go through their insurance.

Because they're "on the hook" for all the ongoing expenses during the repair, i.e. car hire, etc. As with most things these days, there are shortages of parts and labour, so even a "simple" repair can take several weeks, all the while, they're paying a few hundred per week for the hire car! Then there are the "unexpected" additional costs, i.e. where the body shop discovers something else that needs repairing/replacing, so the insurance firm have to build in a contingency. And of course, insurance approved body shops charge more because they can in the same way that tradesmen charge more for insurance jobs.

It's a racket.
Financial ombudsman takes a dim view of people being unknowingly put into credit hire.
Put in a complaint to your insurers saying that you did not consent to it and want the courtesy car available under policy, or a car provided by the responsible insurers.

Can someone explain why the unsurance company would rather write off a car and have copper tow it, even if it can be repaired and is drivable?

I had 2 accidents in one year a couple of years ago. I think the first one I was passed over to auxillis. They did tell me they would seek to cover all costs form the faulty driver. I was bit like hmmm is this all legit. It was all fine though. To be honest it was a very black and white case as person pulled out infront of me at a roundabout. So from where the damage was to both cars it was clearly them at fault. I had that car for ages! I can only imagine the bill. It was early November and I had it until January sometime. Then my own car was back for 2 wks before someone else hit it 🙈

I wasn't even in the car it was parked outside my house. That time his insurance company sent a text saying he was at fault and if I would like a replacement vehicle once mine was picked up to contact them. So I did and they arranged a car for me.

@whydoieven Well done for fighting!

Car insurance is such a scam, and it's so unfair because it's a legal requirement to have.

I don't understand why the government hasn't sorted this out before. Or why Panorama/ Watchdog/ Martin Lewis/ BBC etc aren't investigating and exposing it. Afterall, it affects all of us and people working at all these places must have come across these issues.

But op you can also cancel the contract within a time period, can't recall either 10 or 14 days

That only applies if the contract is valid. If it isn't valid, you don't need to cancel it as it's void anyway.

I suggest that the lack of transparency the OP has been subject to (which is obviously deliberate) means they cannot be considered fully informed. Therefore no contract.

Can't quite comment now but I will add my name to this list
My companies were achl and spectra
Avoid!!!
But op you can also cancel the contract within a time period, can't recall either 10 or 14 days
Do it if you are still in this window of time!

Haven't RTFT, but there's a way of doing this for yourself, online & for a small fee. The database will have both sides' details as long as both parties reported it to their insurers, & it can be searched using the reg no of the other car & the date of the incident IIRC.

@whydoieven - This is exactly the type of topic that Watchdog or Martin Lewis would get their collective teeth into. Have you thought about writing out your timeline so far and emailing them to get their input on how the insurance companies/claims handlers/car rentals are running this system, along with any solicitors or anyone else who has their finger in this pie, and you're wondering if this might have an impact on the annual costs of car insurance. It must do, surely?

Surely there's a difference between a courtesy car & a hire car?

Night and day. Hence the suggestion the OP was effectively missold a credit agreement. Which means it can be cancelled as they were not properly advised.

Surely there's a difference between a curtesy car & a hire car?
By calling it a curtesy car that would imply free as they are letting you use it as a curtesy while yours in being repaired?
Surely that's illegal although I'm guessing buried in their t&Cs it says they use the term curtesy car when they mean hire car.

There was a High Court case recently which ruled that car dealers are required to inform their customers of any "nice little earners" they are up to with finance companies. Basically they are going to have to repay a fucktonne of commission to customers.

I wonder if these disguised car hire schemes could fall into the same category. The OP has basically been dragooned into signing up for a credit agreement without the customer safeguard checks the FCA requires.

It's basically (yet) another PPI scandal waiting to be resolved.

Maybe move this to legal ?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2l9vvj097lo

@whydoieven thanks for starting this post and for people adding comments

i like to think I’m pretty clued up on Insurance but wasn’t aware of this. It's quite shocking. I'll be making people aware if they have to make a claim

Yeh it's awful, we had the same. Felt very much tricked into something that we would never knowingly have agreed to, and then forced to send on all our bank statements, pay slips etc to avoid a massive bill ourselves. Totally wrong.

But the relationship between you and your insurance company and the CMC/credit hire company is none of the other side's concern. The other side's insurers are only liable to pay a reasonable amount to compensate your loss. The fact that the murky web of companies surrounding your claim are trying to take a cut is arguably not their problem. It's all a terrible mess.

Ok change it to 'your insurance company ' then.

No, because it's not their insurer pushing the extra cost onto you, it's your own insurer.

If your own insurer gave you a five grand mattress to replace your ruined SilentNight and tried to reclaim the cost from your neighbour he would rightly tell them to sod off.

Then complain to them.

That’s exactly it. Credit hire costs difficult for the CMC to reclaim in the absence of impecuniosity.

By analogy, if my upstairs neighbour's bath overflows and the leak soaks my bed, then I can go and buy a new mattress for a thousand pounds and sue them for it. If I buy it on a high cost finance deal and expect them to pay an extra 300 for the interest then I'd expect pushback for why I made that choice and whether it was strictly necessary.

That's a bit of a false analogy. The equivalent would be their insurance company dropping off a Barker and Stonehouse bed as a replacement and then saying afterwards that you have to pay the difference between that and an Argos basics one, even though you just wanted your Silentnight divan replacing.

The whole courtesy car thing is an absolute racket and as for the claims management side of it.

We had a courtesy car whilst they took our car away and mended some scratches on it.
We'd have been happy with some money on an Uber account for a weeks worth of minor journeys as we don't actually use it for work. But instead it cost the idiot-reserver a lot of money. But that wasn't an option.
Our idiot-reverse also tried to pull the "it wasn't me driving it I was at home miles away" ... and unfortunately for him when I finally got to the bottom of the reason for delays I sent the insurers the remaining photos of the incident which solved the problem. I like to think someone from the insurance company rocked up at his house and confirmed his ID and showed him a photo of him stood looking at our car whilst saying "gotcha".

Always take photos of the scene and people there when you have an accident.

We've shared dashcam footage recently with the police of an incident. It made it easier for the poor bloke who has his (courtesy) car smashed to bits. I dread to think how much of a nightmare his life was beyond his foot injury dealing with this second accident in a short space of time.

I had my hire car for about a week and it would have cost over £1k for that length of time. A year later the other person who was at fault still hadn't paid up. I told my insurance company from the start I didn't have the money to pay for it and haven't been asked.

Believe me the garages get absolutely nothing from credit hires apart from constant phone calls. In fact garages pay the insurance companies for the privelege of having the repair deployed to them

I quite agree that in practice it's not being presented to the victim appropriately, but the perpetrator's insurers would argue that that's not their fault. It's a mess.