so some guy backed into my zed at work today, put a nice dent on the front bar/front quarter on the driver side to the left of the headlight and above the parkers I've got his details and all that, so what should i expect from dealing with his/my insurance company? how can maximise my chancse of getting things fixed to my liking etc etc any tips? and so on *pics in the morning if people still care about this thread*
should be able to do what you want...tell them you want to take it to ur own repairer...they like cheap quotes, so gather up some prices... replace lights if damaged with 2k spec, 2k front bar coz sells these http://www.conceptzperformance.com/
go the shaved 2k front bar (but it isnt cheap) shipping from coz on a front bar chad is $350usd ,trust me i know
Tell them your car is part of a club etc, say you want a metal finish where the original part is metal etc... I had a moron do a u-turn into me while I was driving, went to my repairer of choice, hada metal finish, all up prolly cost em $3,500 would have been cheaper to cut out dent and bog it up...but dont settle for bog, lessens the value of your car too
in the last 3 months my parent's camry has been hit twice. The first time it was hit by someone who locked up the brakes in the rain and slammed into us and the second time a truck parked up the street lost it's handbrake and rolled down the hill into our car... (talk about unlucky). both times we weren't at fault so we didn't make a claim through our own insurance. We immediatly took our car to our repairer who we know does good work. If you don't know a good panel beater, ask around and find someone who is good. Then, get the panel beater to deal with the otherparty. Panel beater's love insurance jobs and the first time our car was hit the panel beater simply called the other party (we took down his details at the crash scene) and asked for his insurance details. The panel beater then makes a claim against the other party's insurance and puts together a quote for the insurance assesor. Now the insurance assesor is pretty much paid on behalf of the insurance company to slash money off the quote. The first time our car was hit the damage came to roughly 5000 (quote figure). Usually the insurance assesor will try to get the car written off if the damage repair is roughly upto 70% of the market value of the car. Ours is a 94 camry (market value about 5-6k) so they tried to write it off. This is where it pays to not go through your own insurance company. We supplied details to our panel beater about the money we had spent on our car in the last year (servicing, maintenance etc). Basically we didn't want the car written off as it was worth more than 5k to us. Also it's a Camry Manual, only 130,000km, and it was fairly mint at the time. So the insurance assesor agreed not to write it off but began to slash parts off the quote. The original quote of 5k for repairs included all new parts (boot lid, lights, bumper etc) but the insurance assesor said he'd pay 4.5k and only let us use used parts. But panel beaters are smart. They know that the insurance companies are tight. So they always overquote. Even with the 4.5k allowed we still got brand new parts and in addition they even resprayed our bonnet and front fenders which weren't damaged at all in the crash but we asked if we could pay extra and get them resprayed as they were fading and becasue the panel beater had over-quoted they had money and paint left over to do it free for us. Now if we had gone through our insurance company, we'd be pretty certain the car would have been written off as we have no say in it anymore. When you go through your own repairer you have much more leverage. And if you're thinking about what happens if the other party deines the accident? Well you can still go through your own panel beater. When the truck rolled into our car initially the driver gave us all his details so when we gave the details to the panel beater, after a week of calling it turns out that this driver (or his company) want nothing to do with us. So now the panel beater sends the company a letter of demand which is a legal way of saying "pay up cheapskate". In our case the truck company still refused to make a claim. But the car was repaired anyway and we made a claim through our own insurance against him and we ended up not paying anything as it was the other party's fault. Any more questions feel free to ask. But basically, make sure you get the car back looking mint. Don't settle for anything less than what it was like before. And get a quote written up and then ask for the allocation of the costs and see if you can get your choice of front bar instead if it's within the costs.
do i need to inform my insurance provider? or is that only necessary if the guilty party denies the claim?
not 100% sure if you have to tell your insurance company but I think your insurance company only needs to know about unrepaired damage. if you get it fixed then it's all good. but our panel beater advised us that if we wanted more control over the repairs to not tell our insurance company. If we told our insurance company our insurance company would take our car and then deal with the other party's insurance company and in this case both of us were with AAMI so there would have been a good chance that they'd have written off the car. If the other party denies fault that's a different issue. Then you need witnesses etc and the police get involved. but in this case, he's backed into your car, he gave you his details, it's a pretty clean cut case and there's not much he can do to say that he wasn't at fault. However if he refuses to supply insurance details and make a claim then this is when you inform your own insurance company and they will make him make a claim (so you don't pay a thing).
