A Possible Response To A Vehicle Damage Claim

If you have purchased car insurance, and then you get into an accident, you have the right to submit a vehicle damage claim. After you have made that claim, you must wait for the response. Suppose that your insurance company tells you that your car has been totaled? What should you do?

First, find out who will pay for the damage.

If you have no fault insurance, your policy will cover certain damages. If you have collision coverage, your insurance will pay for all damages. When a policy holder lacks both no fault insurance and collision coverage, the insurance company only pays if a 3rd party has been held responsible for the accident.

How much money can you expect to get from the company that sold you a policy?

That depends on the policy’s limit. An insurance company does not pay more than the limit stated in your purchased policy, regardless of how greatly your vehicle has been damaged.

What is your car worth?

If a car is a total loss, the worth of that vehicle has been determined by the market. It is worth its market value on the day of the accident. Personal Injury Lawyer in Stouffville knows that once a car has been totaled, an insurance company has the right to take it and sell it.

Still, that does not mean that the policy holder must accept the insurance company’s decision, regarding the car’s worth. Yet if a policy holder disagrees with that decision, then he or she must come forward with evidence that supports the basis for the policy holder’s argument.

What sort of evidence can be used to support that argument?

While the insurer has assumed that the car’s market value matches with the car’s actual condition, that may not be the case. It could be that you have installed certain expensive accessories on your vehicle, accessories that should increase its worth. If that is the case, you must present photographs that show the intact automobile, along with its accessories, before it got damaged.

Policy holders have the right to contest either the car’s estimated condition or its declared value. In order to contest the latter, the policy holder must offer evidence of the actual value. In order to obtain such evidence, policy holders have to spend some extra money.

That money gets used as payment to a professional appraiser. Here again, photographs prove useful. An appraiser can look at photographs that were taken before the accident. Then the appraiser can declare the vehicle’s actual value, which may be different from the market value. As can be seen, it is not easy to convince an insurance company to change its decision, regarding the condition or value of a totaled automobile.