Written by In 2002 I was driving my 1991 Toyota up to a mountain resort in Oregon and a guy in a medium size pickup truck backed into my front end at a stop light. Apparently he’d gone too far out in the street and needed to back up behind the white line and didn’t see my car. The damage was only to the front bumper, but he hit it pretty good and it didn’t look like it was going to be inexpensive to fix.
We got out and exchanged our insurance information. He apologized for hitting my car and admitted it was his fault. I decided not to call the police as getting them up there would not only take awhile, but this guy was honest enough about the accident and I had another witness with me. Later on that day I filed a claim with my insurance company and told them the whole story. His company, or I should say his father’s insurance company agreed accept blame for the accident and assess the damage at a private assessors location.
A few weeks later I brought the car in and when they were done with the inspection they gave me a quote for $700! That was an absolute lowball, there was no way I could get a Toyota dealership in the Northwest to order a new fascia and/or repair and repaint the existing one for $700. I mentioned this to the assessor and he said that if I take it in for the service then they will pay whatever the final difference is on the bill, but they weren’t going to give it to me in cash.
I don’t agree with this kind of logic. What if I took it in and it cost $1,800 to fix and handed them a check for $700 and said “Hey the insurance company said they’d pay the rest”. I’m doubting they would hand me my keys and say “We’ll take care of it”. My guess is that I would have had to take my car in and get an estimate, then file another claim with the same company in order to get a larger amount of money or worse reimbursement.
This is how claims are handled in my opinion. Either you get low balled or you get denied.
