The Lemon Fool

Our ancient Fiesta had just been written off by our insurers, John Lewis. I was impressed by how easy it was too claim overall. They have valued the car at £2300. Googling,I see very similar cars advertised retail for £3000-£3500. Is this the appropriate price to expect them to pay? I assume insurance should allow me to go shopping and buy the same car again.

Then there will be a separate question of what car next. Or local ford dealer had the advantage of being both 5 minutes walk away, and very good. So another Fiesta/focus is on the cards.
I'm considering going electric. Even an 80 mile range would cover 90% of the journeys we make. What puts me off going electric for now is that I suspect none of the garages in our small town might be able to service/repair it.

Midsmartin wrote:Our ancient Fiesta had just been written off by our insurers, John Lewis. I was impressed by how easy it was too claim overall. They have valued the car at £2300. Googling,I see very similar cars advertised retail for £3000-£3500. Is this the appropriate price to expect them to pay? I assume insurance should allow me to go shopping and buy the same car again.

Correct, the insurance is to put you back in the position you were in before the claim. You should expect market value for a private sale for an equivalent vehicle less any excess.

Get all the ads you can and send them off to the insriers (blimey, haven't heard that as an issue for a while actually).

Paul

Indeed. Standard practice is always to reject the insurance company's first offer, because it's often/usually a try-on. They'll come back pretty fast with a better offer.

BJ

The phoned me now, and after some dubious arguments about their definition of the "actual" value of the car he agreed to compromise on £3000. Still a bit low, but I can't be bothered to argue while on holiday.

He appeared to be saying that second hand car prices are unusually high now and therefore, er, are higher than the "actual value". Makes perfect sense I'm sure.

For example, he said, a car you saw advertised at £3200 may only sell for £3000.
Aha, I said, then I will accept 3000 in order to bring this to a close .

And after that he couldn't say no really.