Car insurance claim

[User19313]

Hello

Someone reversed into my parked car and left details. We spoke and she said she was hoping to pay the repair costs herself rather than go through insurance. I spent two weeks getting difference quotes and advised the damage costs would be £800. She then said she will need to go through her insurance but has now checked and it says she needed to notify them within 48 hours. Can she not claim now? But she also can't afford to pay?

LordEmsworth is right, speak to your insurance company.
The 24/48 hour thing is irrelevant, she's just trying to get out of paying. Report the accident to your insurance company now.
No one can tell you how much excess you have to pay, it should be £0 as it's her fault. If it were your fault then it depends on your insurance, everyone's excess is different, depending on various factors including experience, age, etc. plus you may have included a voluntary excess when you took out the policy to lower the price you paid. Your insurance policy documents will contain this information.
Your insurance premium (the price you pay each year) will go up, that's why insurance companies ask about claims when you her a quote. 'No claims' discount is just that, a discount applied for not making claims, or, if you have paid to protect it, not making more than a certain number of claims within a specified period. Again your policy documents will have this information.
As for how much your insurance will go up by, that depends on many factors individual to you that no one can really tell you on here. It's unlikely to be £800 though so you are as well going through your/her insurance to get your car fixed.

P.S. Never lie when you apply for insurance, in the event of a big claim insurance companies check every detail to try to get out of paying and they will find out.

Contacted my insurance who referred the case to an independent agency for people who's situation is not their fault so that I have no excess and it doesn't affect my no claims. They have now come back and said they can't help me due to the vehicle being a drivable total loss, which basically means the damages are worth more than 60% of the vehicle. They are now passing my case back to my insurance. What does this mean? That I'm going to have to pay an excess and lose my no claims? That the driver who hit me isn't affected?

I would go back to the person who hit you and ask for there insurance details, your insurance should be able to track them via there registration.
Your insurance should be able to claim all expenses from her insurance

Have they sent someone out to assess your car?. Its sounds like its a right off as the cost to repair is more than half of the cost of your car. I would hope your insurance company will pick this up but potentially yes you will need to pay your excess and will lose some no claims if you haven't paid to protect it.

Definitely not a right off - just a dented door that's all. It's purely cosmetic but to repair is a new door unfortunately costing £1000 and my car is probably worth about £2500.

You will need to go back to your insurance and see what they say .
It does sound like the car is a right off as £1000 to repair is over 60 % of the car's value.
You should have the information of who hit you and I presume some kind of note / text of her admitting liability and asking for you to get quotes some sort of paper trail you could give to the insurance so they can claim off her

If the repair costs are more than the car is worth that's when it's a 'drivable write off'.
Someone must have been out to assess the damage though? Or have you sent photos?

I've sent photos. What does it mean for me if the car is a driveable write off?

It depends on the company - mine don’t increase premium for non fault claims.

You’ll be paid out for the car, and it’ll be collected by the insurance company.

But I can drive it just fine it just has a cosmetic dent I can't be left with no car! My husband uses it and is a key worker visiting patients in the community

@Deathbyfluffy

🤞 that's the same for DD . They did say to ring when it's due as it's at the discretion of the underwriters.

You might be able to buy it back from the insurance company, with the insurance money and still drive it.

My legally parked car was crashed into by a hit and run driver who was never caught. Unbelievably it went down as a fault accident on my insurance! Took years to get my premiums back to where they should be.

It's a category N write off. Contact your insurer tomorrow and ask to buy the vehicle back.

You'll get a payout for the book price of the car and they probably won't charge more than £1,000 for you to buy the car back (considerably less than that potentially if it's worth £2.5K - my DF bought his Cat N back for about £200 and repaired it).

You then need to reinsure it as a Cat N vehicle and you can use the balance of the payout to do the work. Premiums may be a little higher but ask if your insurer covers Cat Ns (not all will).

It's worth it if the car is worth more to you on the road than trying to use the money to get a similar year/model - which with the market the way it is you'll probably struggle to do.

I don't understand why any money is leaving my account if the other party has admitted fault?

Feel like the worst advice I've received is to tell my insurance about this now reading all these comments

OP, the worst advice you took was to listen to the other woman who screwed you over. You should have gone to your insurer from day 1.

The car is written off. So you'll receive a payout for the book value of your car. If you think it's worth £2.5k, it will probably be less in reality, so let's hypothetically call it £2k.

You can then use a proportion of that to buy back your car from the insurance company, based on you getting a £2k payout, it'll likely cost you between £200 and £600-ish (10-30% of the value).

You then have money in your pocket to repair the vehicle (if you want to - if it's only a cat N it's cosmetic and doesn't require a new MOT to put it back on the road). You'll then need to reinsure it under a new policy, stating that it's a category N write off.

No, that's what you should have done in the first place.

Failure to inform your insurance company of an accident, even if you aren't going to claim from a third party, invalidates your insurance policy. You made a mistake in not telling them immediately after the accident. This is spelled out very clearly in your policy.

OK and I paid out for insurance in September for the full year so that money is now lost and I have to pay another £400+ to reinsure out of my own pocket? So in fact buying the car back will mean I will have no money left for the repairs.
Why would they pay me for the value of the car rather than the value of the repairs when that is less?

Happened to my SIL, her car was hit from a car coming out of a side road, all caught on CCTV so her insurance could see that her version of events was correct, other person at fault. Due to the damage to her door they told it was a write off, she accepted the insurance money and bought the car back from them, had the door repaired and carried on driving the car. She could not have afforded a new car and buying her write off car was incredibly cheap due to it being a write off car.

There are loads of cars under the write off categories on AutoTrader, I kept having to turn off that option when I was buying a car. Google write offs and the different categories, I believe there are 4 and about buying a write off car. I think it is only an issue if you come to sell it in future as less people want a car that was written off but if you plan to keep it until it dies it is fine.

Firstly you are likely to get a refund on the unused months of your policy (usually minus an admin fee). Check your policy documents.

If you buy the car back you'll have plenty to pay towards a new policy. Buying back a Cat N write off is usually between 10% and 30% of the value you're paid out.

They're paying you the book price of the car. You don't have to buy it back, you can just take all of the money they give you and buy another car.

But with the second hand vehicle market the way it is, £2k isn't going to buy you very much at all. Your car (especially if it's in otherwise decent condition) may be worth more to you than buying a replacement. Look on Autotrader for the same model and year and compare how much it would cost you to buy a similar vehicle, and compare that with the cost of buying it back as a category N, getting the door replaced (if you want to), and re-insuring it as a category N. A new policy shouldn't be prohibitively more expensive, but the premium you pay may be a little higher.

In short - they won't pay you the value of the repairs because the car is a total loss. It's written off. Buying it back is an option that should be available to you if you ask.

You won't know the answer on any of this until you contact the insurance company.

Thanks so much I understand now

Best of luck with it all. You could actually end up better off (my DF did, by several hundred quid once he paid for the repairs at a local garage).

You can get the car back on the road with a repaired door at a cost of £800 if it matters to you, insurance shouldn't be too much more, and just drive the car until the end of its life.

Category N cars are worth less than equivalent cars if you sell them, but if you're going to drive it for years to come, it's likely to be economically more sensible to keep it on the road.