This week I have mostly been dealing with the fallout of a hit and run accident. It's all on film via dashcam. "Excellent" said the Insurance Company One Call, "you don't need to pay the excess. We'll sort you out with a courtesy car". But when the agreement came through it was a hire car agreement which said "I understand this is not a courtesy car agreement". So I didn't sign it. Because if there was a problem I'd be liable personally for all the excessive costs. Suddenly my car is a total loss and it's a Fault claim and the men from COPART are ringing up to sell it for scrap. Not happening mate. I took it round the body shops myself and got a repair estimate half the car price.
The insurer still wants to Category N it though. And they refuse to contact the 3rd party to establish fault even though fault is unequivocal and the car that hit me is fully taxed and insured. Well, actually I haven't seen the Assessors report so who knows what category it is? So it sits on the drive. Perfectly safe to drive with only cosmetic damage whilst mean men argue about money and try to find excuses not to pay out. Of course I could take them to the Financial Ombudsman to try and get rid of the Category N but that takes 8 weeks to get started. So what with not supplying a hire car, not categorising it properly and leaving me to replace the back wheel with a spare and buy my own wheel hub... What bit of the insuring businesses do they actually do?
Here's the insanity of Category N. Once the car is declared a total loss you're not allowed to drive it even though it is drivable. If you take the pay out and keep the car then it's immediately uninsured ...so how do you take it to a bodyshop to get a quote unless you have a low loader? You can't? The solution then is to drive it to body shops before you take the payout while its still insured. Many insurers won't let you although to be fair to One Call they did when I asked. Really the car is being treated as unsafe merely for the economic crime of being cheap. This is nonsense. Only one person has had it on a lift to check the chassis is okay. The man from Kwik Fit. I'd like to say all the other bodyshops did an expert safety evaluation but most of them just sort of looked at it, tutted, sucked through their teeth and said "that'll cost ya, mate." But at least it will have to go to a repairer before I can drive it again... the corollary of that is that if I had a more expensive car it could be potentially be patched up with no mechanical checks at all before someone let it loose back on the road because they're not legally required - the analysis of whether a car needs to be repaired and tested again is largely economic rather than factual.
Negotiations with the bodyshop car mechanics have been slow partly because whilst I want to talk about technical nuts and bolts, they want to talk about selling me exactly the kind of dodgy hire car agreement that my insurer offered me. One where instead of providing a courtesy car, I sign off on extortionate hire car costs to be dumped on the third party insurer which I'm liable for when they say it is ridiculous... One Call's Hire Car agreement is also based on the fact that I say the car is unroadworthy which is simply not true. It just looks a bit ugly. Of course the dents should be sorted out so that should there be another collision they can crumple again... but the car isn't unroadworthy in any meaningful sense of the word... None of it makes any sense ...except to the money men. I grow tired of looking into the eyes of greedy middle aged fat men. So much so it would be easier to buy a new car... or would it? Once it's been declared a Category N I can it turns out ...reinsure it with no technical legal tests whatsoever... not even a new MOT ... which makes the whole process a performative farce of everyone pretending to care that the car is safe but not really... which explains why you see so many cars with dents in floating about...
My favourite part of the process is where they ask you for photos of every side of the veichle and a copy of the V5 (even though they don't need it for a Category N) so it can go straight up on the Copart website for auction without the inconvience of anyone even having to photograph it at Copart. Copart are not happy I wont return their calls and have blocked them... They had to send a snail mail letter. No office address on it of course so probably a hoax... They say they need to store it ...even though it is safely stored in the garage. But of course you can't charge the third party £25 a day for that...
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