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I reversed out of a parking space, and I was almost parallel to the road when crunch, a car reversed into the side of my car. The driver’s door is ruined and the metal sill below is dented. I have a dash cam video, doesn’t show the crash, but you can see I am almost parallel to the road when the car suddenly rocks from side to side, and comes to a halt.
I’m using the repairer recommended by LV, hope that’s sensible, and I’m hoping the fault is assigned to the other person. Had she looked in her rear view mirror, she’d have seen me. At least she had insurance, and gave valid details.They initially said it was their fault, then changed their minds.
I would say it’s better to use a VW approved repairer to maintain your car’s corrosion warranty - if your insurer’s recommended repairer isn't VW approved, you’re likely to invalidate your corrosion warranty. You may find some of your insurer’s recommended body shops are VW approved.
You can find your nearest VW approved repairer at the link below under ‘Paint and body centre’;
I seem to remember your car is silver, which used to be one of the more difficult colours to get a good colour match. This may not be such issue now with modern spectrophotometer paint matching technology being used by many good quality body shops, and any new paintwork should also be blended into the existing paintwork on adjoining undamaged panels to disguise any slight colour shade differences.
When collecting your car after it’s been repaired;
check panel gaps between any new panels and existing panels are uniform and the same size as all other panel gaps.
ensure there are no ‘hard edges’ where areas not to be painted have been taped off, and there is no overspray onto trim, windows and no paint spray drift through panel gaps onto the panels behind panel gaps.
check any new paint for 100% accurate colour match in different lighting conditions and from different angles and ensure the paint finish is to factory standard.
take someone with you who can give an impartial view on the quality of repairs.
Hope the repair process goes smoothly and your car’s soon back to its pre-damaged condition.
Ask around for a place with a good reputation - just having VW approved repaired status is not an indicator of quality work, as I found out 11 years ago when my 2 week old MK5 Golf GT Sport TDI170 got clattered by a bus. Absolute p*** poor job done and as I brought it back time and again for remedial works, I saw many other disgruntled customers doing the same.
I'd usually steer clear of insurer recommended repairers too - they usually get paid a fixed amount per job, if they get paid £1200 to replace a door and lock for a break-in then great, if they have to do a £3k job for their fixed £1200 then they cut corners, repairing bumpers rather than replacing, doing smart repairs rather than painting a whole panel etc.
If it's not your fault, you usually pay a heftier excess to go somewhere of your choosing, but will get it back off the 3rd party.
I would always take my car to Mill BMW in Sunderland for smash repairs now, they were excellent - unlike Benfield/Lookers North Tyneside who painted my Golf R's front bumper when someone scraped it - not hooking up my headlight washer pipework properly on the rebuild - 2 weeks after repair I was losing 2L a day from my washer system.
Usually when someone is hit when one person is reversing - fault is almost always assigned to the reverser by default. If your dashcam indirectly shows that you had finished your reverse manoeuvre when hit then you should get blame assigned to the other party easy enough.
Last time I was hit, the other party scraped my car in a supermarket while I was in store and shopping. An old fella in an old X-Type Bag. There was a witness who saw everything and waited for me. The old guy was sat in his car waiting for his missus to do the shopping. Me and the witness confronted the guy and he denied doing it. We showed my paint on his car and he denied knowledge of doing it. The witness pointed out that the old guy had got out of his car to inspect the damage, so knew he had clipped mine. He provided his phone number and nothing else. I took photos of both cars and him. My dashcams showed him not there and then there, and then leaving, but not the incident - he hadn't crossed over the front of the car to trigger parking monitoring, but pedestrians had at the interval between me leaving the car and coming back to it, so I had patchy coverage which showed my witness had a prime view. It also caught my confrontation with the other driver and us inspecting both cars, it showed my car had not moved in the time that his car was there and then his leaving. He neglected to contact his insurance and was abusive when I rang him with a quote to tell him it was dear enough to be an insurance job (painted bumper, but the incidentals of having the bumper off meant the ACC unit needed recalibration, which meant a £400 wheel alignment was required first - a £300 job becomes a £900 job because of ACC), so I had to report it to his. As I knew he was going to play silly buggers, I got a legal handling agency to step in. They do charge extortionate hire car fees for their trouble, but make sure you are not liable for any costs if they've decided it is not your fault to take the case on.
Their insurance decided to play funny buggers and refused to pay the claim even though they agreed that their client was at fault and had lied about the circumstances when pressed for a response. The dashcams footage and witness completely condemned him as untrustworthy.
My legal company took the other insurer (Eagle Star Direct) to county court and won by default as they were a no show. An £1800 claim now sits at £8700 after snowballing costs that the other side could have nipped in the bud by paying up promptly. Next step for them to recover the money is to send in the bailiffs.
I got a call from my car insurance provider (who'd had no involvement in the case) 2 months after the event - the old bugger was claiming I had hit him, a month after the event - I can only assume he pranged his car a few weeks later and tried to implicate me in some kind of revenge claim. After handing over the casefile that I provided to the legal company, they declared his a false claim. Not sure why they wouldn't pursue him for making a false/fraudulent claim, but they confirmed that they wouldn't.
Long story short - even indirectly, dashcams with a parking mode can help establish the truth.
That tale just reinforces my theory that all insurance companies just want to keep pay outs to a minimum and would rather leave their customer open to increased policy charges, than spend time proving that their customer was fault free, not good, the insurance world looks after its member companies well before their customers - as well as the usual total lack of rewarding returning customers.
Thanks all, some excellent advice there. I Googled ABL and the online reviews are glowing, so it looks good. Still on tenterhooks waiting for the fault assessment.
RUM4MO wrote: ↑Fri Dec 28, 2018 10:40 am
That tale just reinforces my theory that all insurance companies just want to keep pay outs to a minimum and would rather leave their customer open to increased policy charges, than spend time proving that their customer was fault free, not good, the insurance world looks after its member companies well before their customers - as well as the usual total lack of rewarding returning customers.
That's why I told it. I had little confidence in my own insurance company trying hard to fight my corner when the other side is being uncooperative. The fact that a big underwriting insurer like Eagle Star Direct have refused to pay despite admitting fault, and has increased the amount payable 8-fold with their dogged belligerence show that they're chancers who don't care about keeping costs down.
At the end of the day, the customer collective ends up paying, if they put prices up as claims get higher, they get.more money. 5% margin of £500 is more than 5% of £400.
Another tactic I've faced is the other side not reporting the accident, so you get your company to chase theirs and the other side's company are obliged to chase their client for their account of events. You hand over irrefutable evidence and still the other side waits because their client remains silent. After a 10 week wait, the other side decide that they've waited long enough for their client, and given the evidence (photos and dashcam footage of waiting at the top of s slip road to get on an overpass roundabout and being rear- ended after being stopped 10 seconds) they settle "without prejudice". The other side's client hasn't lost their no claims, nor had to pay an excess, because the company doesn't have the means to extract it from their client without permission or proof that they're aware. Their insurance company allegedly can't or won't cancel their policy after that. It's like these credit card companies that tolerate a level of card fraud and never chase to prosecute.
Unfortunately the sill is dented, a door would be an easy replacement, I guess the sill means breaking open spot welds to replace it. Or perhaps they have methods to remove the kink from the sill, as you only notice it if you are looking closely.
It might not be necessary to replace the sill panel - some body shops might use a method similar to the glue pulling method that some PDR guys use when it’s not possible to gain access to the rear of the panel, like in this YouTube video;
I had someone put a parking ding into my rear nearside wheel arch and there was no access to the the rear of the panel for the PDR guy to remove it. He used the glue pulling method and completely removed the ding and I’d defy anyone to find where the ding was.
That was the sort of thing I was thinking of, and I hope the body shop do that, but the cynic says that a panel replacement would create more work and profit. Perhaps the sill is a thicker component, making that technique less useful.
And a link to the dash cam video edited to show the seconds before impact:
Some repairers (especially repaired nominated by.major insurance groups) work on a fixed contracted repair price, so they will do the cheapest/easiest option to try and make sure that even the complex/expensive jobs have costs minimised. For the sills, you might end up with unkinking what they can and filling in depressions before painting.
Repair companies are not averse to cutting out spot welded sections with an angle grinder and welding in new sections if required (had a rear quarter panel replaced this way).
If they do replace that sill, make sure they apply the underseal to the underside/bottom edges before painting (you can see the rough/ridged artex-like finish coming up from underneath).
When I had damage to the underside of my VW Up, caused by slowly driving over a dark log on a dark road, the garage tried to pile on as many issues to fix as possible, to maximise the insurance cost. I know what you mean about sealant, I’ve seen it on my car, and the previous Up. Looks like I have quite a few things to check on collecting the repaired car.
Got the car back Friday, lovely repair, but today noticed the wing mirrors were not defrosting. So it's going back to have that fixed. Rang my insurer, and the other party has admitted liability. I feel sorry for the young woman who reversed into me, she was maybe 18 or 19, so her renewal will be sky high. Hopefully her job does not depend on driving if she can't afford it.
Leif wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 3:22 pm
Got the car back Friday, lovely repair, but today noticed the wing mirrors were not defrosting. So it's going back to have that fixed. Rang my insurer, and the other party has admitted liability. I feel sorry for the young woman who reversed into me, she was maybe 18 or 19, so her renewal will be sky high. Hopefully her job does not depend on driving if she can't afford it.
If she was that bothered, she could have done it outside insurance.
We had this with a neighbour's daughter, she reversed her Audi A4 out of the driveway so fast the reversing sensors didn't even have time to trigger before she blootered into our Captur.
£1500 of damage, she paid cash because she didn't want insurance involved.
Obviously, for us, there was an element of trust because we knew the girl, but my point remains that it would have been possible for you/her to do a deal outside insurance.
Leif wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 3:22 pm
Got the car back Friday, lovely repair, but today noticed the wing mirrors were not defrosting. So it's going back to have that fixed. Rang my insurer, and the other party has admitted liability. I feel sorry for the young woman who reversed into me, she was maybe 18 or 19, so her renewal will be sky high. Hopefully her job does not depend on driving if she can't afford it.
If she was that bothered, she could have done it outside insurance.
We had this with a neighbour's daughter, she reversed her Audi A4 out of the driveway so fast the reversing sensors didn't even have time to trigger before she blootered into our Captur.
£1500 of damage, she paid cash because she didn't want insurance involved.
Obviously, for us, there was an element of trust because we knew the girl, but my point remains that it would have been possible for you/her to do a deal outside insurance.
They didn't offer, and to be honest it would require a lot of trust on my part, and no benefit to me, especially given the significant amount of money involved. Of course we could have informed the insurers and she could have paid, that would have avoided a claim, not sure if they allow that. But I would not have been comfortable with not informing insurers.
I feel sorry for the young woman who reversed into me, she was maybe 18 or 19, so her renewal will be sky high. Hopefully her job does not depend on driving if she can't afford it.