Stolen Car Recovery

[Carthief]

Changed username in case any of this is outing.

We had our car stolen last Tuesday, had a call an hour or so ago to say they had recovered it which is awesome.

But, in a fit of unusual organisation, I sent the insurance company the keys with the claim documents this morning!

It’s in the police compound at the moment but how do I get it back? I will call the insurance in the morning but does anyone have any experience of this? I was a bit shocked when they called and all questions went out of my head.

How long are they likely to keep it at their compound - what happens if we don’t have the keys when they want us to collect it?

What will the insurance do re the outstanding claim? Will we have to pay anything? What if the car is damaged?

Phone your insurance company and ask them what to do. They usually have a 24 hour helpline.

Ah do they? The normal lines close at 7 so I hadn’t checked for a 24hr line.

Thank you!

Ring your insurance company and tell them you've sent them the keys before it was found and recovered. They'll probably get the locks changed on it and any damage repaired and return it to you. They will pay all the recovery/storage fees though you might pay your excess, depending on your policy. Once reported stolen to the insurance company it's technically their property when found.

Ex- insurance claim worker here.
Call your insurance tomorrow - it's unlikely anything is going to happen until Monday now as police storage tend to have limited opening hours, they have it on a police hold to complete their own tests / investigations on it (depending on the circumstances of it being taken and found) and it's unlikely a garage is going to be ready to accept the car tomorrow.

Your insurance should arrange for your car to move to a garage (although they may speak to the police storage yard to confirm extent of damage so they don't waste time of it's clearly damaged beyond repair).
They should also arrange for your keys to be sent to the garage - where I worked we had a smooth process for this and would be able to talk you through it.

As for excess, usual process would be that it will need to be paid to the garage once the car has been repaired or it will be deducted from your settlement payout of the car is written off, although some policies waive excess in the even of theft - you'd need to check your policy documents.

Thanks all.

The police said they were carrying out forensics on it at the moment - to be honest there have been so many stolen locally in the last two weeks and every one has been found utterly trashed - broken windows, ripped seats, panels beaten up, that I sort of stopped listening after they’d confirmed that it didn’t look like there was any major damage!

Will call the insurance first thing in the AM to update them and leave them to sort.

Will also call police and ask if there are any contents still in it, there was a fair bit of random stuff in there - nothing expensive obviously but a pain to replace so it would be nice if we’ve also been lucky enough to keep the contents!