Volvo S40 mirror is £380 fitted. I know I had to replace one when mine was knocked off when the car was parked and I was left with a stump. The labour was only £40 of the total. The woman at the body shop described the cost of parts “astronomical.”
When an uber crashed into my S40 I got a price for repairing the scratch on the bumper. As I recall it was £500 for a repair, through insurance it would be a new bumper, £1K.
You need to make more use of your eBay account 
@T.C on a slight deviation, what is your expert opinion on a recent slip of mine …
Country lane, dropping down to single shared lane and one in each direction. I was approaching a blind bend, brought my speed right down to about 15 because of the conditions. Along comes a transit doing at least 40 round the corner as I am about 5m from its vanish point. I blip the throttle slightly and bank a hard left onto a gravel mound just off the road and try dabbling the rear to ride it out back onto the road but low side- thankfully just as the van clears past me.
He sods off without stopping to check if me and my partner are okay or talk about insurance and fault. Now I am fully aware there are no cameras anywhere near and I dont ride with a crash cam. Would reporting it to the insurance do anything other than bump my premium and lose no claims?
@Giveitsomebeans. Hope you and your partner are OK?
The law states that if owing to the presence of a motor vehicle on a road, injury or damage is caused to a third party, then all drivers must
Stop
Exchange details of the registration marks
Exchange detail of the drivers/riders
Exchange details of the owners of the vehicles (usually applies in the case of company vehicles)
And in the case of injury, provide insurance details to anyone with reasonable grounds to so request those details.
So in your case, the, the Transit can be deemed to have been involved in a crash and be the cause of you lowsiding the bike.
So to answer your question.
Yes you could report it to your insurance company, but unless you have a registration number, who are you going to claim from unless you can identify the driver by other means?
If you report it to your insurers, without someone to claim from. it will be put down as a fault crash so it would result in a loss of no claims.
You could put it through the MiB on the untraced track, but there is a £350 excess on the first part of any damage claim and it takes 80% longer for the MiB to process a claim as well as being a very precice protocol to follow, in addition to which you have to report it to the Police and they are not rerally going to be interested.
Last point, whilst it is not a requirement to have dash cam footage, even if you did identify the vehicle and/or driver, evidence is going to be a case of your word against his, (your partner would be deemed biased) and so the chances are they would go for a 50/50 settlements at best. If he had hit you (and I am glad he didn’t) that in itself provides a lot of evidence.
Hope that answers your question for you?
Yeah that’s pretty much what I though, albeit more eloquently put.
Not clued up on MiB but seems like another one to chalk down as experience and move on. I have since put mushrooms on her to avoid future road rash (the bike not the girlfriend) and see it as getting my first drop of the bike in 6 years of riding out of the way!
So I chased and chased and chased. Phoned regularly emails etc. They’ve finally got back to me today:
Dear sirs,
We understand that you are disputing liability and we have tried to obtain a witness statement to support your defense however we have not yet been successful in obtaining this. We have no further evidence to support your version of events it is likely this case will settle as a 50/50 basis as both parties are stating that a lane change caused the collision.
We look forward to hearing from you.
I’ve already sent them a reply asking them
a) exactly what they did to contact the witness as I had no trouble contacting them to thank them for stopping and to ask if it was okay to forward their details to my insurer. Witness said to me that they’d never seen the driver indicate
b) I corrected them that I wasn’t changing line, just completing a legal undertake as you’ve said. My insurance is up for renewal end of May so wanted this wrapped up before then
c) I’ve told them I’m not going to let this go down 50/50 just because they’re too lazy to look into it
I an of course understanding that they’ll be working on a skeleton staff level right now presumably but there’s also going to be a big drop off in claims so I expect them to be able to find some time to be able to look at it. I do have in writing from this witness by text that they’ve seen the driver basically drive into the side of me without indicating
@slow-ride thanks for the update. Why am I not surprised at the response you have received.
It may be worth making it quite clear to the insurers that you are 100% sure of the facts and on that basis you would be happy for them to issue proceedings against the third party.
If you have also been able to contact the witness, then it may be worth suggesting that in the event that they are too lazy to make real contact, you will be happy to obtain a statement yourself and produce these witnesses in court to support your claim.
Ask them who, other than the third party has suggested that you were changing lane? The third party is of course going to allege this on your part because they can see liability hitting them hard and a massive payout against them.
You hold all the aces.
If your insurers still fail to act, then there is always the option of registering a formal complaint (which is obligatory as the first course of action) and then taking it to the insurance ombudsman. They get fined just for the complaint let alone any action taken against them. It tends to focus their minds.
Thank you, I’ll get back to you with their response
I actually did this against the person/company representing me. Actually, I just threatened to do it then they literally could not work through mine quickly enough.
defo worth asking who’s details you need to put on the form of complaint to the ombudsman and they will come running.
@T.C Finally the insurance got back to me after I really through the my toys at them and all they did was send
“Case is now closed as the third party is no longer claiming”
This means that the value of the claim is £0 as I never claimed against 3rd party either
I think I do have to still report it on my insurance renewal but can I put the other party at fault? The fact that they were claiming against me and now no longer are is surely enough to imply fault?
I would suggest that you can still put the 3rd party down as being at fault as the driver has a statutory duty of care to ensure that it is safe to change lanes and position in the carriageway without putting others at risk, and even had it been established that the driver had indicated, it means diddly squat because any person using the indicators is obliged to give a signal of intent as opposed to giving a signal of achievement.
You will indeed still need to report the claim that was made, but insurers should be able to pull up the file and see that it did not go anywhere and that in theory the cause of the “contact” was the fault of the third party. You will have complied with the compliance and declaration requirements but they should be able to treat it as a non claim quote (don’t hold me to that though as I worked on the legal/liability side not insurance so it might require clarification)
It would also be interesting to know why the third party dropped the claim. Suggests that maybe she realised or was told that she was on a sticky wicket and decided that discretion being the better part of valour, she was better getting out of the claim whilst she was still ahead.
It would be an interesting question to ask.
May also still be worth reporting your insurers to the financial ombudsman give the poor service they seem to have provided in dealing with your case.
Thanks, I’ll put it down as third party at fault. As an experiment I’ve had some quotes come in and they are higher than in the past even with it being a claim of value £0 and ascribing blame to other party
I’ll get back to them with asking why - I’ll feed back to you when (if) they reply
I was contacted a few weeks ago by their internal investigation team, they are going to get back to me at the end of the month with that result. Once they’ve done that I’ll probably still report them all the same
Whatever anyone does when in an accident, don’t go anywhere near McAMS. Some cunt drove over my machine a week before Xmas 2016 and I haven’t had a penny. Last time I called them they blamed the lawyers they use and said not to call them any more. I dug out the paperwork and explained that I don’t have a contract with BarelyAllowedToPracticeLaw (Bond Turner) of Liverpool. Useless.
Their internal investigations team found no fault with the way they had handled the claim, witness apparently contacted multiple times. Amusingly, the internal investigation team promised me a response in 2 weeks and that I was legally entitled to one in 28 days or something and missed both deadlines.
The reason the claim was dropped was because the other party paid out from their excess.
I asked the question at the time of what special steps they took to ensure the witness could get their side of things across in the instance that they don’t have a printer/couldn’t get to the post office during lockdown. Did they take a statement over the phone for example. This wasn’t answered
So I finally got round to ringing up about a renewal, it’s taken me this long to calm down from it all
Obviously get round to accident, I’m on the phone as it’s multibike but I know the online form so I gave them the boxes to fill “hit by third party, value of claim = £0, ncb unaffected” - all undisputable facts. They then asked me a question I’d never got before “did the 3rd party provide written confirmation of fault”. Not an unreasonable question, sure, but not one I’d been asked before. Anyway I said no, but I do have written confirmation that they were dropping claim because third party was paying it out of their own excess. MCE wouldn’t go into it any further than that at the time because as far as they were concerned there was now no longer a claim.
I made point that if the other party is paying for damage out of their own excess, which you only pay in fault circumstances, implicitly then they are admitting fault.
Anyway they said they are going to be in touch with the claims team to get more info on the accident and get back to me. At a strong guess, I would suggest that they are going to put it down on record as my fault as there’s no explicit written confirmation. Because the value of the claim is £0 it might not materially affect my policy cost but it’s still annoying.
Wow that’s a sneaky question… Does anyone confirm in writing accepting fault these days? Even in the case against a farm which I won, they paid out ‘without prejudice’. No mention of accepting liability…
Especially when an accident has no claim (I had a few I had to declare due to there being a witness/ camera on bus but neither vehicle was damaged enough to warrant claim) it could prove a nightmare.
I remember having these arguments with MCE re fault and always had to battle on phone but eventually got them to write down as no fault.
Luckily now.its been 5yrs+ so all clear.
Good luck is all I can say…
Claim against a farm? As long as it’s not too gruesome I’m interested in that!
Yeah I left it at the time as I felt like that was really as good as I was going to get. I’ll have a good battle with them if they try to fight me because as frustrating as it is, the price difference can be a few days salary
I just can’t believe a light shunt with no injury and actually minimal damage can drag on this long
Not really gruesome. They left mud in road, I hit mud and lost bike. Bike written off but luckily no serious injury to me or wife
