Any 'Arthur Daley' Car dealers in da house ?

My missus had a smash on Saturday and it looks like she's written off one of our cars ( hers ), Both her and my eldest daughter are OK and not physically hurt apart from the shock of the whole incident.
Basically she was tootling along at about 50mph within traffic (cars in front and behind - safe distances being observed at all times), when the car just decided to F**k off to the other side of the road for no apparent reason. She had just gone round a bend where there had been a much more serious accident about 3-4 hours before in the exact same spot , the cops thought that she might of hit some spilt fuel or had a blowout due to accident debris. There is also the possibility of a mechanical failure to the steering, i honestly don't think there is anything she could have done. We always take care on that piece of road as accidents there are at least a monthly event. She's probably driven around that bend a million times over the last 12 years. If she had hit anything coming in the opposite direction it could have been carnage , luckily the one car that was coming down the road opposite managed to dodge her.

The car suffered a worse fate than my wife & daughter . The front is completely smashed in as she made full use of the front crumple zone when she hit a high grass verge and a dry stone wall, the car also spun around during the crash damaging the rear of the car and the underneath. I reckon it will be a write off .
It is/was a Fiat Brava 100SX in excellent nick with FSH, etc, owned by us sinced new, 1999, T reg with 65K. I reckon that it is probably worth more to me as an insurance scrapper than as a trade in/sell s/h , so she might have done us a favour. I had it insured for £6,000 looking at my policy, however i realise i will only get the current market value.

The main purpose of this post though is : Any ideas of what i might get for it, It must be worth a grand at least ?

I have been paying out insurance for ever but just realised that I've not actually made a claim for many years and even then not for a write off, what happens ?

 

have a look here:
http://www.parkers.co.uk/pricing/us...deriv=16123&plate=60&pay=false&buyorsell=sell

cheers


julian

 

If it's a write off the insurance company will effectively buy it from you for its market value. There are rules about recording write offs etc. so it may get complicated if you want to buy the debris back from them.

Paul

 

look on Autotrader. When mine got written off last year, the insurance company went through it looking for similar cars and then offered me what it would cost to buy them.
A quick glance and I'd guess £2,500. You won't get to keep the car, they immediately take possession. It's probably going to be a total loss with that sort of damage, so your best bet is to start gathering evidence now. If you want to argue with their valuation you need to find quite a few examples of the same car with the same mileage on sale for more. They won't pay off any outstanding finance, so you can lose out big time there

 

Thanks for all the inputs guys and taking the trouble to reply. Certainly plenty for me to get my teeth into over the next few days. I said that I bought the car new and to all intent and purpose it was, however it wasn't brand new, it was an ex-demo with 3,450 miles on the clock, registered 5 months previous. I paid £6,500 for it at the time and so will be reasonably happy with a sub £1K per year depreciation, just as i was happy getting it 'half price' when i bought it. I bought the car for cash and so no remaining finance on it.
There are no other vehicles involved and the wall that she hit was already destroyed from earlier accident's , so I am hoping for a quick turnaround on this one. Looking at my policy I also get a free curtesy car for at least 14 days, so we should have reasonably wheels again soon. ( I do have my family 'Dog Car' to run about in at the moment , but the less said about that particular vehicle the better ).

Thanks again.

 

this may not work but if you hold out on there offer for longer then you could get more

i got nearly £1700 for a l reg 306 1.9 non turbo diesel when there original offer was £1300 jsut for holding out and comign up with stuff like id jsut serviced it, jsut filled the tank, had it valeted etc etc etc

 

Don't let the insurance company try to rip you off. My dad had a 1996 N Punto SX which we had a bad accident in 2002, we had owned the car since nearly new and for this reason was quite attached to it.

When it was declared a write off the insurance company offered £1000 for it, at the time M Reg 55 S (much much more basic) were going for this. The nearest price we could find for a similar model was £1700. In the end they agreed to offer us £1500 agreeing that the original offer was unfair.

We nearly replaced it with a Brava (or what ever the 5 door version is called) but at the time decent equiped versions were going for £2000 which was £300 too much. We bought an Escort in the end, apart from a bit of problems fixing previous garages poor workmanship the car has been great. It has 80k on the clock now and still runs like new.

I am guessing the Focus or Astra MK4 is slightly out of your league at the moment so you're looking at some main stream model around the 1996 year?

 

I'm not exactly sure what we are going to do at the moment. I think i'll just see what the insurance have to say, maybe run about in the curtesy car for a while ( basically as long as i can keep it ) and then make a descision. A small hatch looks favorite for the type of use it will get something like a Punto, Focus, Astra, Corsa, etc. It will be my wifes car so she'll have final say even though i'll be buying it and topping up the purchase funds if required. If i do go for a new car then it will be another 'nearly new' they are usually just so much cheaper for little use/milage. I have had brand new cars before , but i don't think i will ever do so again, unless i ever have lots of money to burn...

I'll probably end up down the auctions though, i like the thrill of the sale yard, e-bay has a lot to answer for getting me addicted to auctions.

My wife is off work at the moment and so two cars aren't essential. I also spend a lot of time 'on call' for work, in case the Aircraft goes sick during the day, this always seems to happen when i'm off shift so now i've got a legit excuse now for not being available, ( wife has gone shopping in the car , etc..)
Sometimes you have to look a little harder for the silver lining but every cloud has one

 

Good luck, just try and avoid the Fiat Cinequento or Rover 100 if she intends to drive anything faster than 10Mph.

I guess the great thing these days is you can get very good cars for very little money, there is no such thing as real bangers anymore unless you're paying less than £500 and thats usualy much less.

 

OK fella's I've had a develpment. My insurance companies approved Engineer has inspected my car and said that it requires about £4K worth of work to put it right and so it will be written off as beyond economic repair. He agreed that it was in excellent condition, with FSH, etc, and so has given me a value of £2,600 (which is top retail), minus £100 for slightly high milage, minus £100 for my policy excess. This should give a final settlement of £2,400 . He said he based his estimate on the Glass' Guide book price. Considering that i only thought i'd get about £1,000 -£1,500 ( shows how much i know ) and considering that the Parkers guide book price is actually much lower I'm tempted to just say sod it and go for it. I also asked on the Fiat Bravo Forum and was told to expect circa £2000. I reckon that is decision made eh, What do you reckon...?

 

Sounds very fair to me. I'd snap their hand off for that one, they won't go up that's for sure

 

Just a little anecdote:

The insurance people authorised the repair centre that was storing my smashed car to get it taken away by a vejhicle dismantler. No problem apart from the fact that they had told me that i would be informed first as i still needed to remove some personal effects from the car, namely my CD multi -changer, a small Pioneer powered sub woofer, and a tool bag holding a handfull of usefull break-down tools. I feel a lot more letters are going to be exchanged before this one gets sorted out.

Also,
After taking the dogs for a walk down the local forrest my wifes friend was tootling along the road , well within the speed limit in her Volvo V70 and keeping a 'normal' reasonable distance from the car in front,when all of a sudden it just shot off the road in exactly the same place my wife's car had fallen off nearly two weeks previous. She said that she couldn't belive her eyes , the car just went around the bend then left the road, smashing through the same wall my wife had hit and rolling over twice ! The car was a fairly new BMW 3 series and so not too shabby a motor, spooky, although I went to have a closer look at my wifes crash scene a few days later and the area is littered with bits of broken off car !

Edited to add:
A picture of the crashed Beemer was even in our local paper today, sitting on it's roof !

 

Sounds like Salford. My dad had an accident in his Punto in 2002 to the point it was a right off. The accident happened because the red lights were impossible to see and there were no road markings whats so ever. He just didn't see the red light. The police said it wasn't my dads fault because given the circumstances it was too easy to miss the fact there was a junction there. Otherwise he would have been given a large fine and a lot of points on his licence.

There are many junctions like this in Salford, neglect is common place and it causes accidents. All too frequently you hear on the news accidents that keep happening in the same areas of Salford. No wonder the council was branded the weakest in the country.

Another blackspot is the Snake Pass in Derbyshire, that road is apparantly the most dangerous in the country.