Thanks to all those people who wrote to me showing concern when I wrote my Panda off. Here is an update.

The Insurance company have agreed a settlement of £5,000 for my car and I have bought it back for £375. To be honest, it does not have too much damage and can be easily repaired. All the panels are available from Fiat, it only needs 1 wing, bonnet, grill, bumper, radiator and headlights. The chassis is not damaged, so it will be an easy rebuild. The insurance company wrote it off because it is too much trouble to repair an old car. This means it will be cat.C but I will photograph every stage of the rebuild. I have no plans to sell the car, so the cat.C won't be a worry.

Incidently, the valuation by the insurance company (NFU) shows how valuable our old Pandas are, look after them!!!

Great news!

Could I ask whether this was an agreed value on a classic policy, or otherwise how they arrived at the valuation? Do you have anything showing the valuation?

I'm interested as I have several Panda's on fairly arbitrary agreed valuations - they are all going up in value but I have no real idea where the values should be. Something from an approved insurance assessor would be very helpful particularly if it explained where the figure came from. I'm also asked to comment on values in relation to Fiat Motor Club members' vehicles, so again something concrete would be good.......

Cheers, Gavin.

Palio said:

Great news!

Could I ask whether this was an agreed value on a classic policy, or otherwise how they arrived at the valuation? Do you have anything showing the valuation?

I'm interested as I have several Panda's on fairly arbitrary agreed valuations - they are all going up in value but I have no real idea where the values should be. Something from an approved insurance assessor would be very helpful particularly if it explained where the figure came from. I'm also asked to comment on values in relation to Fiat Motor Club members' vehicles, so again something concrete would be good.......

Cheers, Gavin.

Click to expand...

Tbh Gavin this is a different case to what would need to be done should a UK spec car be written off to prove it's value.

With this case, importing another may well have been a contributing factor in payout, in order to put the owner in the position they were in before.

With regards to UK spec, it's a matter of seeing what the nearest equivalent are avertised for, and indeed sell for, ebay etc are the only easy ways of proving value.

Jon.

I did not have an agreed valuation, the policy just said market value. With my claim, I provided print offs of all the adverts for Panda Country Clubs that I could find on the Internet. Of course, they were all in Italy and when the prices where averaged, it came to £4500. The engineer who inspected the car used to work for Fiat years ago and said he had never seen a Panda in such good condition, so I suggested my estimate of £4500 undervalued the car (a bit cheeky but it worked!). They phoned me today and offered £5000 and asked for £500 for the car. I talked them down to £375 and think I have got a good deal. A local body shop has offered to do all the repairs for £3000 using all new Fiat panels. In addition, I can go and do the stripping down myself to get the price even lower. The fact that the car was lhd and import had no bearing on the valuation because when I told the NFU that I could only get a replacement by going to Italy (I was trying to get them to pay my travelling expenses - cheekily), they said the fact it was an import was no concern of theirs and they would only pay the market value.

The moral of the story is, print off every advert you see for a car like your own and keep them with your car details. I have just been paid £5000 for a car I bought 10 months ago for £2700 on Ebay!

Out of interest who was at fault? That'll also affect claim in as far as how much clout you can have with an insurance company if you know how.

An excellent result Glad to hear you will be repairing it also, although £3000 seems abit steep for the work you say it requires, even with genuine Fiat parts. Not that it matter ofcourse as the insurance company will be paying for it!

Sadly, I was at fault because I drove into the back of a car turning right! The £3,000 estimate was the maximum it would cost with the garage doing all the work. However, I will be doing some of it myself and expect the cost to be much less. I've just got to see how it goes, after all the insurance has paid far more than it will cost to repair it.