Was rear ended by a wagon yesterday whilst stationary at temporary traffic lights. Other driver admitted liability and phoned insurance in scene. That night I informed my insurance company.

Today Aviva (the other drivers insurance) has contacted me to sort everything, also Gladiator (mine) has contacted to sort.

Who’s it best to let sort, I’m not injured, just the van VERY bent. Can’t help feeling mine want the business to drive up the costs to Aviva, but don’t know what rights I may or may not lose.

Arrange everything through your own Insurer.

They will claim all costs back from the other drivers Insurer.

I would never deal directly with a third party’s Insurer as I am not their customer, they have no contract with me.

Agree – use yours. Insist on original parts and repairs by a main dealerif your wagon is not too old and still under warranty. The other guy’s insurers know they have to pay, so they are contacting you to try and do the job on the cheap to save money.

If you let your insurers take care of it, there is no incentive for them to do the job on the cheap as they will recover from the other insurers anyway, i.e. they should do a proper job.

I would never deal directly with a third party’s Insurer as I am not their customer, they have no contract with me.

Just to add a different side to this, I had a crash where the other party drove into the side of me. Obvs notified my insurers but the o/s’s insurers accepted full liability from the off, collected my car for repair, gave me a courtesy car throughout, and dropped back a fully valeted and repaired car, at no cost to me or my insurance.

Obviously your situation may be different, but don’t discount it. The third party insurers are just trying to avoid costs which are outside their control such as your insurer’s legal fees etc.

Go through your insurers and don’t accept their sorting it.

As long as you have admittance from the other party then it will come from them and your NCB won’t be affected. Sadly your premium will go up, most likely, it shouldn’t but after our car was hit, parked, when we were in a different country, with the other party admitting liability and both of us having the same insurer, our has gone up.

Just make sure that in all communications you state “this will come from / be covered completely by the other party’s insurance” especially if it’s to do with a courtesy car or anything like that.

Also be prepared to get some examples of cars in the same condition as yours for valuations if it’s a write off. If they offer a repair, then ask to either have it sent to a main dealer or repairer of your choice (if you have one) or it will go to the cheapest garage the other insurer can find.

Keep in touch with your insurers and make sure the liability is confirmed and that you confirm you will incur no costs.

i would go through theirs. if you go through yours you have to stump up the excess untill its all settled, and you have less rights to have it repaired where you want (you can only get it repaired where your insurance contract states), plus if they turf you over to an accident managagement company you can have a ballache with hire car costs (claiming them off the 3rd party).

if its very bent it’s likely to be a writeoff, I suspect it’ll be done and dusted quicker dealing directly with the 3rd party

Just to add a different side to this, I had a crash where the other party drove into the side of me. Obvs notified my insurers but the o/s’s insurers accepted full liability from the off, collected my car for repair, gave me a courtesy car throughout, and dropped back a fully valeted and repaired car, at no cost to me or my insurance.

That’s all fine when it goes smoothly.

If there is a problem with the repairs, or some other issue crops up after the third party’s Insurer have “settled” the claim, that’s when it would have been far better to arrange everything through your own insurer.
Your Insurers are paid to work on your behalf to settle claims and deal with any associated problems and disputes, why not just let them do what they are paid to do.

It’s not particularly underhand, the other insurer would prefer to:
Pay the courtesy car direct with their own deal rather than your insurer paying their deal and then charging retail rates.
Fix your vehicle at cost/trade, rather than the other insurer doing the same and then topping up the costs to retail price.
Avoid your insurer trying to appoint a claim specialist to be doubly sure you don’t have any injuries and skim off some of the injury claim.

In addition to the above. No fault claims must be fully declared at renewal. I had a wing mirror wiped out by a bus in Edinburgh. They quickly admitted fault & my insurers sorted everything. 4 years, 11 months later during renewal with another company I failed to declare this (in their eyes) & ended up with a flurry of aggressively worded letters & an insurance premium with an additional loading. They made a massive deal about this despite me telling them on the phone during the quotation that the event had happened & that it was around 5 years ago. This was accepted but then they waited until the two week cooling off period had elapsed before starting with the letters, so if I decided to cancel the policy I’d have to pay the cancellation fee.
I’ve digressed a bit, sorry. But it’s worth bearing in mind.

That’s all fine when it goes smoothly.

If there is a problem with the repairs, or some other issue crops up after the third party’s Insurer have “settled” the claim, that’s when it would have been far better to arrange everything through your own insurer.
Your Insurers are paid to work on your behalf to settle claims and deal with any associated problems and disputes, why not just let them do what they are paid to do.

And it did. That’s what I said. It went smoothly. Why, if the vehicle is repaired by the other side’s insurers, would it be any worse that your own? They probably use the same bodyshop etc.

Ours went so smoothly, and our insurers dragged their feet about a courtesy car, so it worked out much better for me. So much so I ended up switching to the third party insurer at next renewal, and they dealt with another incident a few years later well, and the premium has stayed pretty much the same every renewal (I think it went up by £20 this year, for the first time in ages).

you have less rights to have it repaired where you want (you can only get it repaired where your insurance contract states)

You are free to choose where to get your car repaired with any Insurer.
They are allowed a list of “approved repairers” which may offer additional benefits if they are used, but they are not allowed to force anyone to use them.

Thanks for all your comments. I’ve spoken with Aviva just now and pretty confident that they’ll sort everything to my satisfaction, the hire van is already on its way to me, paid for by them, my van is being collected tomorrow and will be repaired with OEM parts with lifetime warranty on all work. Sounds reasonable to me.

Why, if the vehicle is repaired by the other side’s insurers, would it be any worse that your own? They probably use the same bodyshop etc.

I didn’t say it would be any worse, just that if there were any issues once you get the car back, or anything crops up that wasn’t apparent straight away, or any disputes etc, you are in a far better position dealing with your own Insurer who you pay to work on your behalf, rather than a company who have no relationship with you, who considered the claim “settled” as soon as you took delivery of the car.

You are free to choose where to get your car repaired with any Insurer.
They are allowed a list of “approved repairers” which may offer additional benefits if they are used, but they are not allowed to force anyone to use them.

you are, but depending on your insurance contract they may only pay up to the amount their ‘authorized’ repairer costs – for example you may have to pay increased excess. This is a good thing, it stops people taking their car to their mate barry for a repair who strangely charges 4x as much as a normal garage, but it may also effectively stop you going to a main dealer (and having all your costs covered)

Why, if the vehicle is repaired by the other side’s insurers, would it be any worse that your own

It’s no more or less likely but in neither case is it impossible or even that unlikely.
What is being said is if it goes wrong when your insurance dealt with it you’ve got a better path to getting it rectified than of it were theirs.

Beaten to it by about an hour. Guess I should have refreshed!

There’s a quirk to the consumer insurance regulations which means that the other party’s insurer does not have to answer to FOS if anything on your repair goes titsup as you are not their customer so usual FOS rules do not apply. The other party’s insurer also has an interest in keeping costs as low as possible and coupled with the slight ambiguity over duty of care to you means they could cut corners and you would have little recourse.

For this reason alone I would always go through your insurer and let them deal with the other party.

For once I can claim – I am an insurance underwriter with a qualification in insurance law…

after our car was hit, parked, when we were in a different country, with the other party admitting liability and both of us having the same insurer, our has gone up.

When similar happened to me, my premiums didn’t go up (my car was legally parked on a residential road, it was hit by a wagon and they eventually admitted liability once I tracked them down).

The other guy left a note but didn’t answer for a couple of days. Before I got hold of him our insurer tried to lowball us and told me that I would actually owe them cash! It was a shed / run around.

As soon as I got a name, they upped their offer, especially when he was insured with them.

Sadly our premium did increase, not by a lot, but they said “you have a accident” that affects things. Insurance, they make it up as they go along.

Insurance, they make it up as they go along. have vast amounts of claims and other underwriting data going back 10’s of years and highly skilled, highly qualified actuaries to make pricing decisions based on that data so as to make a return on investment. FTFY

There’s a quirk to the consumer insurance regulations which means that the other party’s insurer does not have to answer to FOS if anything on your repair goes titsup as you are not their customer so usual FOS rules do not apply. The other party’s insurer also has an interest in keeping costs as low as possible and coupled with the slight ambiguity over duty of care to you means they could cut corners and you would have little recourse.

FOS is one thing – it’s not a quirk, you just wouldn’t be an eligible complainant – but it would be just the same if the other party agreed to pay for the repair directly and it wasn’t done correctly – you woulds still have a course of action against the other party, which would in this case be the other insurer, for breach of the terms of the settlement.

Your own insurer also has an interest in keeping costs as low as possible – they all do.

highly skilled, highly qualified actuaries

For once I can claim – I am an insurance underwriter with a qualification in insurance law…

Well you would say that 😉

FOS is one thing – it’s not a quirk, you just wouldn’t be an eligible complainant – but it would be just the same if the other party agreed to pay for the repair directly and it wasn’t done correctly – you woulds still have a course of action against the other party,

Yes agree as a technicality but a lot of people assume that you would have recourse to FOS either way. It is a layer of complexity you don’t need to have to take civil action and can easily be avoided by using your own insurer. Your own insurer is under less pressure costs-wise IRO of repair if they know they are going to make a full recovery from the other party.

sadly our premium did increase, not by a lot, but they said “you have a accident” that affects things. Insurance, they make it up as they go along.

This is one of things that people seem to say quite a lot.
Its so obviously complete bobbins, but that never seems to stop anyone repeating it 😂

I had a very similar scenario, non fault, 3rd party admited full liability.

My insurance were giving me the runaround, wanted excess payment from me upfront, said they couldnt get me a hire car ‘for a few days’ – and it would have been a Fiesta or a corsa or something…yeh right.

The 3rd parties insureres had a brand new c-class delivered to me the same day.
My car, a ten year old Volvo, turned out to be an economic write off and they offered me fair market value for it once it was towed and asessed. They were not in a hurry for me to return the hire car either, they eventualy collected it from my house after I’d been payed out.

As above, if theres no contest, the 3rd parties insurers do tend to look after you better in my experience, as it’s far cheaper for them to deal with it, without cutting any corners rather than having to deal with your insurers, potentially inflated hire car costs and repairs etc.

Our insurance went up on renewal after a no fault claim. One good thing is the police now radar occasionally the stretch of road as there have been a few accidents there.

The emergency services were brilliant, they all came, got us out ok, advised us to remove car ourselves as police charge 160, Even got a lift home in the ambo. Counterpartys insurance did everything.

Make sure you get checked out as my arm really hurt a few days later, took a while for the bruising to come out.

I got my car repaired by another insurance company (I still picked the garage doing the work as was stung by my own insurance co on a previous claim repairing my car) I would have no issue doing it again ( I see most saying not to do it but not really saying why)

Sadly our premium did increase, not by a lot, but they said “you have a accident” that affects things.

That would be because it’s a No Claim Discount, not a No Blame Discount.

( I see most saying not to do it but not really saying why)

Maybe you should read the answers again – it’s explained well.