DH damaged a taxi - advice needed

[TaleofTwoCities]

Hello - please help. Dh damamged a taxi at the station , scraped the paint work on the wheel arch apparently, one of those VW people carriers. Now the taxi driver has told us the bill is £400 based on a quote from the dealer. Does this sound a bit high to you if it is just damaged paint work? We haven't yet got a copy of the quote to check the details. Can he make us pay the dealer price? Should we insist he gets quotes from elsewhere? I mean if it were our car, no way would we go to the dealer for something like that! When would we have to pay the bill? Before or after the repair work is done? I can see that he might take the money and then get it repaired somewhere cheaper. We don't want to claim on our insurance cos our excess is £350 anyway. Any advice most appreciated!

Think the price is quite reasonable but I wouldn't give him the cash. I would ask him to give you a bill from the dealers and pay them direct.

what McDreamy said. It sounds like a reasonable quote from a main dealer and you can only ask if he will get cheaper quotes but I would want to pay the garage direct.

Hmm, guess £400 is not much these days and maybe he has to go to the dealer if he's a taxi...

Good idea to pay the bill directly to the garage, thanks.

IN a sort of similar situation. DH reversed into another car, agreed to sort it outside of insurance, he got 6 quotes and is going for cheapest, he went to dealers first and they quoted up to £1000!!! Now we are paying £370.

DH is paying the garage directly the amount of the quote. If there is any other damage, he will send us and the car owner details for us to see if it is anything to do with our damage before paying.

Thanks, £370 sounds good compared to £1000. I could just see our Christmas budget disappearing . The cost of motering I suppose...

It sounds about right to be honest. Good idea to pay the garage direct though.

The annoying thing about it is that dh drove to the station on his way to work to post a letter. Now we only live round the corner from the station so he could easily have walked...

Still I'm getting a sense of perspective on it slowly. Equally or more annoying to be the one bumped into and it could be worse. Still annoyed with dh though despite having done similar myself once.

I would put any claim through the insurers; anything done outside of their control can lead to more problems as you have described.

If this is a council taxi surely their insurers would want to know about the damage sustained to one of their vehicles and would query with their driver why this damage has not been reported to the insurance co.

Dealers will always charge a lot more than an independent bodyshop for repairing damaged paintwork - and they don't always do such a good job of the repair. The £400 may be correct IF the wheel arch has been buckled as well as part of the damage.