Insurer says car is a "write-off" but it's fine?!

[cakehoover123]

A few days ago, someone drove into our parked Volvo and smashed the headlight and scratched the side panel. (They left a note with their insurance details, hurrah for them.)

Based on a photo, our insurers (John Lewis) are saying the car is a "write off", as it will cost more than the total value of the car to fix. They think the car is now worth £3800, so I'm not sure where they're getting their repair costs from!

The local garage has quoted me £450 to replace the headlight, but John Lewis say even if we pay this ourselves, the car will still be recorded as a cat N write-off, and will cost us more to insure in future.

Do I have any options other than accepting John Lewis's assessment, and scrapping the car? It seems really odd that they want to give us £3800 rather than paying (surely) much less to fix the headlight.

It also seems sad to scrap a car that's essentially fine - not to mention the environmental impact. 😢

This happened to us.

You can't force them to repair it but you don't have to scrap it either. We kept ours.

They will offer you a slightly reduced payment (minus the scrapping payment) so we got £3500, rather than the £4K they were offering to take it away.

But it worked out well as we just paid for the minor repairs (a few hundred pounds), still had our car and had most of the £3.5k left too.

It will be Cat N but I haven't found it affects insurance. It will affect resale price if you decide to sell, but we're never going to do that. Will just keep it till it dies.

It does seem weird that they'd rather post a cheque for £££ than just fix it, but I think by the time they've organised the repair and all the to-ing and fro-ing to the garage, it actually costs them more in manpower, plus I guess they're thinking there's a risk the repairs will come to more if there's hidden damage.

I was given £1000s for mine and allowed to buy it back for less than £500. I got it MoTd and drive it around years later.

Same happened with us. Insurance said it was a write off, but we got our own bodyshop quote which was £1500. We got £2750 value from the insurance firm less a "buy" fee of £500, so we received £2250, paid £1500 for the repair, and we still have the car plus £750 in the bank. Insurance premiums havn't gone up since. Yes, it will show as a write off if we come to sell it, but we've plenty of photos to show potential buyers just how little damage there was, none of it structural, but we don't intend to sell anyway.

Apparently, the bodyshop said insurers write off because their "approved" garages charge a lot more for repairs and if the insurance firm repair it, they have to pay for a courtesy car too, which is typically a few hundred per week, and with bodyshops having a several week waiting list, the courtesy car costs can easily add a couple of thousand to their costs.

So, basically, buying it back yourself after write off means you can source a cheaper bodyshop and can make your own arrangements for transport whilst it's in for repairs!

We had someone drive into our parked car similar to what you describe. It looked ok but turned out it had buggered the chassis - it had gone wonky and didn’t drive properly. Only noticeable at higher speeds but quite unsafe then. A LOT of expensive repairs later it is ok although still not quite the same. Maybe insurers have had this experience a few times and CBA to go through all the checks (and safety/liability risk if this kind of damage doesn’t get picked up).

Write-off just means the total cost of repair and all associated charges to the Insurer exceeds their valuation.

You can appeal - we had an independent valuation from our (brand specific) garage and they then sent their assessors out for a damaged van of DH's - it's a niche size, and specification and impossible to replace secondhand plus was immaculate inside and out so actually far above the average value for age. After inspection they agreed its worth and the difficulty of replacing like for like and it was repaired at the brand specific garage bodyshop.

How strange it's happened to more than 1 of you! I've never heard of this happening before

If there isn't much wrong with the car you can have it written of and buy it back much cheaper. It'll be a Cat N which only affects the re-sale value.

You’ve won a watch! Tell them you want to buy the car back - they’ll ‘sell’ you it for a couple of hundred. They will also give you the insurance write off value - a few thousand, take it to local garage, get it repaired and have a holiday with the left over money. This happened to us before and to a friend most recently whose bumper was fixed for the price of a haircut in our driveway. No difference to insurance either.

You see why there’s a lot of these ‘deliberate accidents’ !

Thank you everyone for the comments. Super helpful.

I will ask if we can buy it back. DH spoke to John Lewis and I'm not sure if they mentioned that option to him.

I'll check for more serious damage but given where it was parked, I suspect it was just a little bump.

Glad we might get to keep our little car! The thought of it going to scrap for a broken headlight is awful.

When we had a no-fault claim, the third party insurer's asked to deal with our claim as they were keen to minimise their costs. (Obviously it was reported to our insurer first, but they were happy for us to do this too.)

We got a larger payout for the written off car than we'd paid for it, and they paid for a hire car until we received their payment.

Has the third party insurer been in touch?

yeah this happened to me, the courtesy car person said beforehand that they'd write it off as they're doing it a lot due to lack of space for one thing. I didn't believe him but he was right. I couldn't afford to fix it myself so I let it go.

That wouldn't be a cat N write off as damage to chassis is structural, or are you saying that the insurer did say it was cat N?

Personally I think they are in cahoots with the government scheme to remove petrol and diesel cars from the road.

The difference is that the insurance company will use all original volvo parts, and specific repair agents that they know work to a certain standard. That's not to say your local garage won't also produce high quality work, but their hourly rate is probably lower and they may use pattern parts.

Also, depending on the category of write off, you can have it inspected by a specialist and get the marker removed from the insurance history so that your resale value remains the same in future.

As per @HappiestSleeping they repair to tiptop standard. Essentially treated the car as if it was brand new.

It's not that it costs more than the car it's worth, it's that it meets their cost of car vs cost to fix plus hire car plus admin percentage ratio. It's ridiculous what is charged by approved repairers and this is essentially what causes our massive insurance hikes.

I used to work in insurance and during the Covid malarkey we wrote off a Bentley with minimal damage because the cost of hire car (of similar ilk of car) while awaiting the part was just too much.

I wouldn't worry about driving a cat N. It's not too much more to insure.

The annoying thing is, the guy who hit your car would probably have been better off just giving you £450 as his compulsory excess is probably £250.

Also you say sad to scrap a car... they will sell that car to recoup some of the money paid out and then that person will repair it and sell it at a profit. All a bit of a joke really.

This happened to my DH a couple of years ago - someone shunted the back of his V reg MG at a junction, splitting the bumper and cracking the number plate. No structural damage. Insurance company immediately declared it a write off and offered him £1900. He asked to buy it back and they said yes, he could have it for scrap value...£250. So we got the car back, plus £1650. Had it repaired locally for £400'ish.
The best part? He'd only paid £750 for it, 3 years previously. God knows where they plucked that price from, but he wasn't about to argue!!

We had this years ago. We were wanting a larger car though so we took the payment (DH haggled to get more from them than the initial offer too) and used that as a deposit on the car we have now (second hand but newer than the one we had, and more importantly a better size). The old car had been costing us a fortune in repairs but the new one has barely needed a thing since we got it so it's saved us money there too.

Ah hadn't realised they wouldn't actually scrap it! That makes me feel a bit better.

Even the ones that are scrapped are usually stripped for parts by the scrap yard (unless a very serious accident), and those parts are then sold into the motor trade for body shops and garages (and keen amateurs) to replace faulty parts and accident damage etc., so still useful.

When we needed a new light cluster, wheels, rear axle, rear tailgate, quarter light and rear wiper motor, after a crazy neighbour hit the back of our car meaning it was a write off - all parts came from a scrapped car that had been in a front end accident - there's no way we could have afforded to use "new" parts. The "back street" body shop we used gave the scrap yard a "shopping list" of all the things they needed, and the scrapyard cannibalised the car for them.

Oh that makes me feel much better. I had visions of it being crushed!

Confusingly the other party's insurer have now also written, asking us to phone them to assess the damage and organise a repair.

Confusing, given that John Lewis (our insurer) have already given us an assessment and offer. Maybe we shouldn't have phoned our own insurer? Which one are we supposed to go with?!

As I suggested above, discuss with the other insurer before making a decision. Just make sure it is the insurer and not a claims handling company. Good luck, hopefully you'll get a great offer!