Who owns the car?

[Dippt]

I posted on Reddit and got some pretty snarky responses 🫣🤣.

I need some help!

Our car was stolen in September, told the police who basically closed the case that day. Told the insurance company who said we needed to wait 2 weeks to see if it’s unrecoverable and then we waited 3 weeks for them to decide how much the car is worth.

On Friday the car insurance company decided it was worth 22k which will pay off the finance. We bought a new car 1 week ago.

On Saturday we get a call from the police to say that our car was involved in a car chase with police and suffered ‘front end damage’ when they drove head on into the police car.

Now on paper we accepted the pay out on Friday, so I think the insurance company now own the car and it’s theirs to do whatever with. Dh thinks that because they haven’t paid out yet it’s still legally ours and we will end up with a repaired car/ car that is needing to be scrapped because of the accident it’s been in.

Please oh Mumsnet help us work out who is the owner of the car?

What have the insurance company put in writing?

Have you accepted the payout in writing or verbally? If you’ve signed and accepted the payout, the car belongs to them, even if you haven’t received the money. If only verbal, and/or nothing signed for, you own the car.

This happened to me a few years ago, my contract with my insurance company meant they were the owners of the car when it was recovered.

You get the money, the insurance company gets the car

We accepted it verbally on Saturday morning before the police called to say it’s been found

According to the Google search I did, then you still own the car as it was a verbal agreement.

Just did another search and it said verbal was accepted- arggh! Ie the opposite.

Haha I think we’re just gonna see how it goes 🫣