can your insurance company insist on an approved repairer? i would rather take it to a guy i have been recommended too and saw his work, but he isnt approved,insurance are saying it must be an approved repairer,any ideas where i stand on this one?its stalling the process as im not happy bout it

I've had similar situations with both our cars......

In my case, by insisting a local garage did the repairs I lost the chance of a courtesy car. But hey - the car got fixed the way I wanted it.

Stick to your guns, but be aware you might have to make some minor sacrifices.

well the worst that could happen is that your insurance company digs its heels in and says it wont pay out unless its one of their guys.

Arty

They're not allowed to insist on their 'aproved repairers'. Its complete b******s and verges on a criminal scam (that's my personal view and not that of Club 323F), putting smaller, local businesses out of work

You can have [b]your[/b] car fixed by whatever garage [b]you[/b] want it to be done by. I've found that every 'aproved repairer' I've used has been crap quality and crap service

Mark

I agree with Mark on this one... the only time it differs if your choice of garage comes out more expensive than the authorised dealers, and even in that case you can still use your choice but you will have to pay the difference.

This happened to me when I wrote off my elise they wanted to get quotes from Ford garage and a peugeot garage ... OMFG I said No way has to be Lotus garage... anyway they still wrote it off

[quote="GOGOBROOM"]anyway they still wrote it off [/quote]

is it true that you can buy it back off the insurance company,
i got my estimate back from mazda this morning for £1290, i can get it fixed myself for about £100, i'am thinking about getting it written off, then fixing it

also, do i have to produce reciepts?

Hope you can get her sorted mate, she's a lovely colour and I know you had some lovely plans for her

You used to be able to buy back from Insurance company, I dont know if you can or not now. Mine was sold to a scrappy and some bloke bought it then mailed me to see if I had the original instruction book and stereo cover lol.

I'm not sure how things work in the UK, but here, once a car is written off, it gets a special code on the central vehicle database identifying it as a write-off/re-build and as such, almost impossible to insure ...

Similar here Smotter they catagorise them according to the damadge done, i.e. cat a, b c etc

Depending on what catagory depends on what needs to be done when reregistering the vehicle and if you actually need to re register. A lot of older cars are written off for minor damadge just due to the cost of the repairs, which generally can be done on the cheap for minimal cost :P

From what I know of the system and like what smotter said, if you write the car off, fix it and then try getting it registered as back on the road you could be making your life far more difficult than just getting it fixed straight off.

I pranged my car about four or five years ago, and it was whisked off to colchester to get repaired by an insurance recommended repair center, didn't get a courtesy car but I didn't really care since I wasn't working at the time and it came back all sparkly and new (well apart from them giving it a crappy rinse over and leaving water marks everywhere).