My patience has been tried sorely these past few weeks.
Wife's car was parked o/s our house, in the street, 3 weeks ago and was clonked hard by a local council minibus, meaning the car will need a new wing. Fortunately for us, as the minibus drove off without stopping, my local newsagent directly across a main road (we're at the head of a T junction, in a side road) witnessed it and recorded the make, model and registration number.... so i got him to sign and date it and kept his note for evidence.
Whilst crossing back over the road from the newsagent i noticed that type of minibus parked much further up the road...so took a look and bingo, same vehicle, with a big blue paint mark down it's rear nearside wing....so took some pictures with a digital camera of our damage with white paint and white paint dust, their damage with recent dirt smudges and blue paint....then contacted the relevant council depot, who rang the driver. He returned to the vehicle, we exchanged names and addresses and he apologised, admitting liability stating he'd had to pull in tight to our car suddenly, due to another driver and hadn't realised he'd hit it when turning right, but with the paint on his wagon and recent damage/paint on ours, it was obvious he'd caused it
so far so good.....but then comes the insurance calim fiasco
a well known budget insurer....(yes i know, you get what you pay for, pay cheap pay twice etc...but with two Jags parked on London streets...that's my excuse)... hear my tale of woe and advise we have a good chance of recovering all our costs etc from the 3rd party, so may they pass us over to an accident handling company, who will provide me with a courtesy car, handle the claim and I won't need to pay our excess (which is steep to keep the premium down)...so despite HJ recently advising against this, i thought, why not?
what a useless pile of cretins they have turned out to be. I've now learnt that these sorts of companies provide two services; 1, credit hire i.e. courtesy car, which they'll lend out if they think they'll get their money back..and 2, repair and credit hire, which they'll only do when the 3rd party admits liability and agrees to pay
who in their right mind thinks a council is going to get their act together quickly and admit liability immediately without waiting for a driver's report and then perusing it at their leisure for some weeks...so in the meantime we're waiting like a couple of numpties. On day 3 we drove the vehicle on a long journey believing the damage to be just visual and found the tyre was connecting with the damaged wing at m/way speeds, so with local speed humps everywhere as well, decided it wasn't wise to keep using the car and parked it up.
When i finally lost patience with the accident handling co. after 2 weeks, because they faffed about trying to get the council to admit liability.. and went back to the insurer, the insurer advised me the accident handling co. would nevertheless let me have a courtesy car even if they didn't handle the claim, as that risk was considerably less to them as they own their courtesy cars anyway..so i thought great, with a 10 month old baby and two dogs we need an estate car, so we will no longer be 'familial housebound'...but no, the accident handling co. declined to provide a car...because... we'd managed without it for 2 weeks and their assessment of being able to claim this off the 3rd party dictated this was a negative...despite me having a genuine provable need for an estate type car. The irritating thing was, if i'd asked for the damn thing within the first 2 weeks they'd have let me have it as long as they weren't expected to settle the claim as well, but of course i was still expecting them to do the whole lot and at that time hadn't told them to go and whistle at that stage.
For 3 weeks solid I have been ringing people every other day, i have been passed from pillar to post. All persons have been 'nice', but i don't want nice, i want effective. How i've kept my patience i really don't know.
End result is vehicle is now authorised to go to garage of our choice (which slowed things down more, but i wanted decent parts fitted and Jaguar paint warranty to be still valid) and i've declined the garage's Nissan Micra as they way things have gone there'd have been a problem with that too.
HJ advised avoiding these accident handling companies....wish i'd listened, it set me back 2 weeks in the system and gave me untold frustration/stress.
p.s. my newsagent needs a great big Christmas present as he's probably saved me many hundreds of pounds, if not nearer the thousand mark, when you consider what higher premiums for two cars would be over the next few years. Any ideas on what to give a married, 35ish Sri Lankan man who's got 3 kids, mild practising Hindu? (Not booze, already thought of that and his wife said the doctor has told him to stop!)
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