Written off car for sale!!

Boaz

Here's the story. House was broken into Jan. '06, car stolen and crashed.
Car was insured for €12,000 by Hibernian and their assessor said the the car was 'written off' and we were offered €7,200 but they eventually agreed final settlement €7,500 - no further negotiation - take it or leave it. A few months later we had a phone call from a guy looking for a spare key for the car and he said he bought the car from Hibernian and was going to fix it up and sell it.
By chance I was in Liffey Valley the other week and lo and behold there was the 'written off' car parked, repaired good as new. I checked on Motorcheck.ie and according to the report the car was sold on 5-Nov.-2007 and had not been 'written off' or 'scrapped'.
Again by chance while looking for a car on Carzone.ie I typed in the make and year of the old car and I discovered the 'written off' car for sale in a car dealers near where I live and I'm going to go and have a look just for the hell of it.
Why didn't Hibernian not offer to have it repaired in the first place? Why were they able to sell it on to be repaired and sold if it was 'written off'? Is this normal practice?Do we have any comeback to Hibernian?
Mighty hacked off at this stage because we could only buy a car for €7,000
and still had to pay off the original loan of €12,000.
Any ideas??? :mad:

eringobragh

Hi

Can you give provide more information

1) Make / Model of car & any extras (Aircon, Automatic, Leather Seats etc)

2) How much the car was on sale for at the Stealership.

colm_mcm

It comes down to the estimate the bodyshop you dropped the car into came up with. If the costs of repair and the scrap value comined is less than the market value of the car less depreciation for being crashed then repaired, then it's uneconomical to repair it.
You would have been given the option to take the price of the estimate less the VAT and keep the car as-is and repair it yourself, or get the insured value of the car.
If someone happened to have an identical car to yours with another section of the car damaged, they could fix yours up for much less than a bodyshop using all new parts.

maidhc

Indeed. I have seen some late 90's cars written off by insurance companies for mere cosmetic damage. If you crash something like an Alfa 156 or a Ford Mondeo you will be more or less automatically told it is written off.

jimmycrackcorm

Written off simply means that the estimated cost of repairing it in a dealers garage was prohibitive. Such cars could be easily repaired with second hand or generic parts for example at a much lower cost.

Boaz

colm_mcm wrote: »

It comes down to the estimate the bodyshop you dropped the car into came up with. If the costs of repair and the scrap value comined is less than the market value of the car less depreciation for being crashed then repaired, then it's uneconomical to repair it.
You would have been given the option to take the price of the estimate less the VAT and keep the car as-is and repair it yourself, or get the insured value of the car.
If someone happened to have an identical car to yours with another section of the car damaged, they could fix yours up for much less than a bodyshop using all new parts.

We had nothing to do with having the car assessed. Hibernian did all that and we had little say in the matter. The current sale value in the car sales place is €5,500 approx.

eringobragh

Year & Model of Car Pls.

was 12k overpriced at the time

seems 12k down to 5500 in a year is a serious drop.

colm_mcm

So was the car actually worth the €12k you had it insured for? what was the make, year and model?

Seth Brundle

Boaz wrote: »

We had nothing to do with having the car assessed. Hibernian did all that and we had little say in the matter. The current sale value in the car sales place is €5,500 approx.

Correct me if Im wrong but you owned the car so you have every right to have it assessed yourselves.

maidhc

kbannon wrote: »

Correct me if Im wrong but you owned the car so you have every right to have it assessed yourselves.

Absolutely.

Fey!

If in the space of 12 months you bought a car for €12k, paid premiums for €12k, only got €7.5k from your insurance, and the car is now for sale at €5.5k, then it looks as if you got seriously ripped off on all sides.

Unless you had a huge excess on your policy. Did you send the ownership papers for the car to Hibernian? And did they definitely take ownership of the car from you, or was it still your property (the €7.5k settlement may have included you keeping the car on selling it on, or do insurance companies no longer do that?)

All I can say is Bad Luck.

drdre

That is possible as someone hit into the back of my sister a 99 honda civic saloon.She was told she would get 4300 for the car as its not repairable.After a day she said ok and when i seen the car there was nothing and i mean nothing wrong to the car but the assesor was a muppet and he said its written off.so i told my sister to contact the insurance company and tell them that i would be interested in the car, they said ok i can have it for 500 and paid my sister 3800.the next morning i got a call saying it was a mistake and they wanted 1500 for the car and i told them to f off and that dont talk to me and here is my solictors number they **** it and didnt contact my solictor as they signed the papers saying 500 euro

Anyway i got the sort sorted for 100 euro as the only problem was the book wouldnt open and it needed a new lock and guess what after 1 week sold it for 4500 .What a profit for seriously no work.that was the easiest money i have made in my life

Just thought i would tell you this story, and that it is possible to get written off or insurance cars very cheap.Its not illegal selling a written off car so whats the problem.

daedalus2097

It should be recorded as written off because that will make any future insurer of the car look for an engineer's report into the repairs so they know it's roadworthy. My insurance company let me keep my car when it was written off (which I subsequently sold for parts) so maybe it's just down to the insurers?