Not fault claim, own insures or third party’s?

As above, any advantages of one over the other? My car got hit yesterday while parked and other driver is admitting responsibility and has put me in touch with her insurance co.

Yep, their insurance pays, that’s what they have it for.

You will still need to notify your insurers but considering there are no injuries, via her insurance may get the car fixed quicker. I tend to avoid hire vehicles as we can always get by without one. Might be easier through her insurance if you need a hire vehicle, ie they are authorising the cost up front.

But you still have to notify yours, not clear if you are suggesting you ONLY deal with theirs?

Your insurer needs to know you had a collision even if no fault because it is material in how they price up your risk – sadly people who have collisions even if no fault tend to have more collisions. As it was a parked up car then hopefully not a problem in this case, but not declaring and getting found out is likely to be a bigger issue than the effect of informing.

Sorry all I had to dash out before I could explain my question further. I have already informed my insurers. The question was realy about payout value as it is looking like total loss. I was wondering if my insurers would pay out the insured value and then recouup from third party as opposed to the third party insurers maybe giving an assesed current value?

Fact is, the car is worth more to me than it would be currently valued at and a similar replacement would likely cost the insured value. I’ve had it quite a few years and used it as a work horse so it looks unloved but I have maintained it well mechanicaly and just got it through an MOT and was intending getting another few years out of it before replacement.

You notify your insurer, they chase up the third party insurer.  That’s it.

Whether it’s an insurance write-off and whether you can buy it back is a longer question.  Well, a short question but a long answer.

I’d open a conversation about her paying for an out of insurance company fix at a company that you choose depending on the scale of damage.

Even if its a no fault situation, everyone loses via a claim. Her policy and yours will probably increase.

I never understand these threads, you have insurance to cover yourself, you deal with your insurance, they deal with everything else. You are supposed to tell them about all accidents. Let them do what you pay them for.

Insurers will rinse each other dry during a claim so the 3rd party insurer will try and deal with the repair/settlement to keep control of costs.  Your insurer (and vica versa) will have all sorts of tricks such as repairing the car at their negotiated repair network rates and then charging the at fault insurer full retail value for the repair.

However I’m also interested in the pro and cons of each option as a punter. I’ve heard before that the 3rd party insurer has less control over whether the car is a write-off as they have no right to retain the vehicle, if that’s true and you’d prefer the car was repaired it might be in your favour to go via the 3rd party insurer

All insurers will try to keep their costs low.

So the third party insurer will try and ‘get’ you onboard with them. It’s a service they are effectively selling to you – no excess, hire car, quick repairs. All designed to keep costs low.

Your insurer may also try and get you to do one of two things. The first is to use their “recommended” legal service, no excess, hire car, etc etc. They do this as they can charge large amounts to the third party insurer. You may be on the hook for the inflated costs. See STW threads passim.

The second is your insurer will fix the car (or write it off etc). You’ll pay an excess and be entitled to whatever courtesy car or total loss hire car is on your policy. Sometimes you’ll not pay the excess, and sometimes it’ll come back when your insurer does something called subrogation against the third party (and their insurance company).

Now, if you have a problem with the valuation, or the repairs, or the service, you can complain. But the only protection you have is when you use your own insurer, as they’re regulated and you can go to FOS.

The third party insurer is – literally – nothing to do with you, so you can moan but there’s no teeth to the moan.

As said above, what’s the point of having a policy if you’re not going to use it?

FOS supports buyback of your car (called salvage) so you may find you’re able to keep it, plus get a payment of part of its value. Winner.

That depends on the write off category, but as long as it’s fairly cosmetic you should be ok.

if it might be a write off I’d go with your own insurer – whilst going with the 3rd party can reduce costs and keep things quick (I’ve done it this way before) you have less leverage with them if they disagree about the value of the car (they can just say “here’s 5 grand, take it or take us to court’, which you probably can’t be arsed to do) than you do with your own insurer (who have a contract with you and you can follow through complaints procedures\insurance ombudsman)

Whatever you do, avoid accident management companies and hire cars if you possibly can. If you absolutely need a hire car, make sure the cost is reasonable (ie not one provided by an accident management company)

Thanks all for the advice! Having just checked my own insurance policy it seems I wasn’t as careful as I usually am when I renewed a couple of months ago and they have it down as insured for market value with an excess that would probably take most of that. Also no hire car included whereas the third party insurers have already offered a hire car at no cost to myself. So it would seem in my best interest to stick with the third party’s insurers and just accept whatever they offer.

Also no hire car included whereas the third party insurers have already offered a hire car at no cost to myself.

Be wary, because if they later back out of the claim for some reason then they may put their astronomical hire car charges onto you.

Someone on here previously suggested just write them a letter saying you’ll settle for £xxxx immediately and as long as it’s sensible they’ll likely accept because even if it’s slightly above the market rate it’s cheaper than months of arguing, loss adjusters, claims management, hire cars, storage fees, etc.  And by doing that it’s potentially not even written off.

When my car got totalled years ago (parked outside my house so no real question of fault)

I had a much better experience just dealing direct with the 3rd parties insurers… My insurers were messing me about and trying to get me to deal with some claims management company and were being really difficult about providing a courtesy car, despite it being part of my policy.

So I told them I was canceling the claim as the 3rd parties insurers had admitted 100% fault.

It works out far cheaper for them rather than dealing with my insurance company so they were really helpful…

Brand new Mercedes c class hire car inless than 24hrs delivered to my door, during the assessment that my car was totalled and until they paid out for my written off car, (longer actually as they couldn’t collect the hire car for a good few days after paying me out) which they gave me fair market value for with no negociations required .. No messing about. Nice and straight forward.