CRV is in the body shop at the moment having been dinged while parked. I spoke to the dinger who accepted responsibility.
Not much to be done of course, but my heart sank at the prospect of going through my insurer and making endless phone calls to get the excess back as has happened in the past. So I asked a pal who's in the business. He suggested that if I wanted it sorted quickly and with mininium hassle I should ask the third party to get her insurers to call me. He assured me they would and he was right. They have accepted responsibility, and had my car collected and a courtesy car delivered within 2 days. They even offered to hire me an equivalent car if I needed it (I didn't - apparently they make this offer themselves to pre-empt the involvement of a claims management company).
Here's the interesting bit. According to my pal, had I gone through my insurers, once they discovered they didn't insure the third party they would almost certainly have passed me on to an accident/claims management company. In all probability I would have been encouraged to claim for 'losses' and been given an expensive hire car; repairs would probably have taken much longer than if the body shop provided a courtesy car; and the claim would have ended up costing more - possibly a lot more.
So what it amounts to is this. The insurers say that accident/claims management companies are pushing up premiums, but they actually use them themselves when it's their competitor who's going to get hurt. Because they are all doing it to each other, the motorist pays.
I have a recent example of how much more accident management costs. Somebody ran into the back of boy's Panda a few months ago. Knowing no better, he went through his documents and found a leaflet for Fiat Accident Management "a free service for Fiat Owners". Of course this is just a manufacturer endorsed money maker. The service was actually very poor, but he ended up with a new Focus Zetec on hire for three weeks, presumably at inflated cost. Fortunately the third party insurer paid the claim. Had he had a body shop courtesy car, I've no doubt it would have been done in under a week as the body shop would have wanted its car back.
The insurance companies may be in competition but they are not on our side.
Last edited by: Manatee on Fri 4 Feb 11 at 20:30
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