Insurance payout
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Discussion

LosingGrip

Original Poster:

8,740 posts

185 months

Yesterday (20:23)
quotequote all
Ive written my car off going over an item in the road and the insurance company have said its a write off (Cat N).

When I paid for my insurance I said it was worth £8,500 (was auto filled).

It had high mileage (almost 160,000). This puts the value down, but when i search for the colour, there are only four on Auto trader.

Prices vary from £10,000 down to £4,000. The cheapest one has similar mileage. The others are between 80,000 and 140,000. But the cheapest is 200 miles away.

Do they take into account the colour and distance from me? Without the colour im fked ha.

SS427 Camaro

8,282 posts

196 months

Yesterday (22:11)
quotequote all
How bad is the damage ?
Cat N should be very light.
I would be keeping the car & repairing it ( if it s clean and well maintained car )
160,000 miles is nothing.

richhead

3,107 posts

37 months

Yesterday (22:41)
quotequote all
LosingGrip said:
Ive written my car off going over an item in the road and the insurance company have said its a write off (Cat N).

When I paid for my insurance I said it was worth £8,500 (was auto filled).

It had high mileage (almost 160,000). This puts the value down, but when i search for the colour, there are only four on Auto trader.

Prices vary from £10,000 down to £4,000. The cheapest one has similar mileage. The others are between 80,000 and 140,000. But the cheapest is 200 miles away.

Do they take into account the colour and distance from me? Without the colour im fked ha.
What have they offered, pay out and buy back?


Mr Tidy

30,436 posts

153 months

Yesterday (22:41)
quotequote all
My car became a Cat N in 2023 and my experience was that they don't take much into account, they just came up with a figure slightly below £2K.

I couldn't find a similar model with manual transmission anywhere in the UK for less than £3K and I sent them links to the few I had found. They said they were worth more because they were M-Sport models and mine was an SE, but mine has Bi-Xenons and a sunroof and none of those cars did. I reluctantly got a another couple of hundred quid out of them and opted to keep the car for less than £500 as it had minimal cosmetic damage, had done only 120K miles and ran really well.

So I ended up keeping the car with 50% of what I paid for it in 2019, albeit now a Cat N, but it is still running fine.

I suspect you may have a battle on your hands, but I hope you get a decent outcome. thumbup

Sheepshanks

40,016 posts

145 months

Yesterday (23:34)
quotequote all
LosingGrip said:
Do they take into account the colour and distance from me? Without the colour im fked ha.
LV told me they look at cars within 50 miles (I think it was 50, it was something like that). The distance came up as they used a car 200 miles away, then admitted they shouldn't have done that. Of course that car was the cheapest on Autotrader and it had obviously been put at that price, £4995, so it would appear first - it had £5995 in the screen in the picture!

The car was super easy to value - it was a special edition, a 2011 Golf Twist, and VW sold loads of them in a short space of time. There were 35 for sale from £5K to £7.5K, the dearer ones tended to note they'd had the cambelt done. As it happens both the mean and median average was £5995.

Most had done low mileage - this was 2018 - around 35K. Ours had done 70K but I don't recall any discussion of the mileage. We'd owned the car from new, it had full service history, cambelt change and had recently had a grands worth of brakes and tyres - they didn't give a toss about any of that.

In the end we got £5495 and they wouldn't budge from that - I still feel they diddled us out of £500.

Re the colour - I don't see that making any difference. I think you'd be pushed to make an argument that you can only accept a specific colour.

Jamescrs

6,144 posts

91 months

I think you are going to have an argument on your hands over the colour making a difference to value to be honest, even if its some special edition be prepared to have to push back against what they offer.

Opapayer

1,773 posts

11 months

LosingGrip said:
Ive written my car off going over an item in the road and the insurance company have said its a write off (Cat N).

When I paid for my insurance I said it was worth £8,500 (was auto filled).

It had high mileage (almost 160,000). This puts the value down, but when i search for the colour, there are only four on Auto trader.

Prices vary from £10,000 down to £4,000. The cheapest one has similar mileage. The others are between 80,000 and 140,000. But the cheapest is 200 miles away.

Do they take into account the colour and distance from me? Without the colour im fked ha.
What do you mean “without the colour I’m f****d”? How many cars are there that are the same, but a different colour within say 75 miles? I’ve picked a random distance but 75 miles is arguably near enough to be considered local ish, but at the same time wide enough to give a good spread of options.

As others have said, I really doubt arguing that your car is worth more because of the colour is going to work.

vikingaero

12,743 posts

195 months

I've yet to encounter an Insurer that doesn't lowball payouts. I'm all for fair payouts, not immoral ones.

My Mum had a non-fault accident and they wrote her car off. Initial offer was around £7,300. The nearest ones I could find were £9k+ with 30k on the clock compared to my Mums 8k. so I screen shotted those and raised an initial complaint. The Insurer tried blaming their loss adjuster for incorrect figures. Really? Then he's a tosser as well as you. Final payout for an hours worth of email ping pong was £9,700. NEVER accept the first offer if you have done your homework.