C32Mark

Last Tuesday I was driving to work early in the morning with flooded roads, pouring down rain and 60 mph winds. I hit a bunch of debris and cones, and a flooded sign that was laying in the road in a construction zone. Took it to the body shop and there is around 9K of damage to my E55.

I call the insurance company file my claim and they do a desk report. The adjuster calls me says everything looks good and he will have it taken care of and a check to the body shop and me sent out today. He calls me today and leaves a message that they have deemed my car a total loss and it's only worth 11K. I call him back and ask him where he got his information and he says our CCI system. I tell him the body shop ran a CCI and it came up 14,100 with my options not including tax and licence. He tells me it's to late and it's been sent to their total loss department. I ask him to send me the persons info and he does.

I get the adjusters info and give her a call and leave her a message. She returns my call and tells me yes I am sorry we have deemed your car a total loss. I tell her I do not accept that and your not totaling my car as you have to spend over 100% of my cars value to deem it a total loss, and according to the fair claims settlement regulations you have to find me a replacement car in the same condition before the accident with the same options as my car. I told her I would call the California Department of Insurance and open a complaint for them to look in to. I then told her I have receipts for almost 10K in work done to the car in the past few months.

She tells me she will look in to it and I tell her I hope so because I feel like you are low balling my cars value and not looking at all the options my car has from the factory like Black Opal paint, blue inserts in my leather seats and there is one here in my town that color for 16,900 at a dealer. I get a call back from the first adjuster back stepping and telling me that they don't really want to total my car and will send an adjuster out to the shop to go over the damage to my car. So we will see what they say next. I love my E55 and have put a lot of time and money in to it to keep it as perfect as you can and will not be taken advantage of!

If anyone else has this type of problem read up on your states regulations on what insurance companies can and can't do. If you just say okay you will be taken advantage of most of the time. Just my.02 and thanks for listening.

HeissRod

This should never be an acceptable answer from your insurance

C32Mark

I agree and I don't understand how they can do a remote assessment of my vehicle never seeing it in person, and say they deemed it a total loss.

carguyshu

uh, why not take the 11k and fix it for the 9k estimate and pocket the 3k difference? When I had a car totaled once they insurance company let me buy it back from them for $100 and this is essentially exactly what I did.

Rocman8

That's only a 2k difference and assuming he has a 1k deductible and has to buy the car back for 500 then there is no profit from it and ends up with a salvage title anyways. Reason they consider it a total loss at 9k rather than the estimated 11k is because big repairs like this always end up having supplements added during the repairs and they don't want to take a chance on that. By supplements I mean once they do the teardown on the vehicle if they find additional damage that couldn't be seen before then they have to add a supplemental claim and then they are probably over the cars value.

C32Mark

I don't believe in owning or putting money in to a salvage title vehicle. There is no value left. Why would you put 9K in to something that has no resale value or is only insurable with PL/PD. If something happens to the vehicle with a salvage title you just through your money down the drain. Just my .02

C32Mark

Actually according to CA a car can only be deemed a total loss only after it has incurred over a 100% of it's value including tax licence and any other fees associated with it. The owner of the vehicle has to accecpt it as a total loss, they can't just decide it is. The insurance company has to replace your vehicle with a comparable one and if one isn't available they have to go to a newer year. They are giving me a really low ball offer and are hoping I am dumb enough to take the offer, which I am not. If they want to total my car I expect to have another Black Opal exterior with black/ blue interior and all of my other options and maintenance my car has had. I have 3 folders from the dealership of everything ever done to the car.

I have been doing a lot of reading on the CDI site to arm myself from being a victim of the insurance company.

mightar

You should switch insurance companies. I've been with USAA for about 15 years now and they would never pull that.

When I had my S6 Avant, the dealer servicing it crashed it (yeah, you read that right). Among other things, USAA gave me a multiple page report with explicit line items for every part and cost total for the fix. Since my car had a clearbra installed and the repair facility didn't have the service to do it, they cut me a check which was more than enough to go to any local clearbra/tint installer to get it done there.

They should be doing the same for you.

hachiroku

I've heard when insurance companies try to lowball your cars value you can provide ads for vehicles of similar trim and condition for a price adjustment. an adjustment to move the value higher as so they do not total your car or mark it salvaged. this would only work if you're on the boarder of the tipping point though.

do you have pics of the damage? 9k is a lot but my paint job was 7k and it was a discounted rate.

Hulk

Rocman is 100% correct
That is why they total cars when the cost is close to the value

red60R

in your case, I sure hope you had the dealer use THEIR insurance to replace your car, since they wrecked it. That's a huge liability lawsuit if not.

mightar

USAA handled everything in my stead. I didn't have to do anything, which is the way it should be. My insurance rate was not affected one bit.

latemodel21

Mark, really sorry to hear about the damage to your car.

Worth pointing out (as it can be costly to find out from your insurance company) ... hitting a stationary object in the roadway (cone for example) is normally treated as an "avoidable" accident (the theory being that if you could NOT stop in time your were driving unsafely for the given conditions). Being an "avoidable" accident usually make it an "at-fault" claim which puts a point on your insurance and you pay the collision deductible. HOWEVER, if the cone is moving (bouncing, etc) when IT HITS YOU (notice the distinction), it is treated as a faultless claim (under comprehensive "falling object") ... so no bad mark (point) and the lower comprehensive deductible (for example, I paid $100 instead of $1000 on a "cone incident" I had in 2015).

This also applies in a slightly different way to hitting animals. If you hit a non-domesticated animal (deer or boar, etc) it is covered by comprehensive ... but if you hit a dog (or presumably a cow) it is covered under collision (and/or you have to go after the home-owners insurance of the animal owner).

The lesson here is, no matter what kind of animal you hit, you may want to tell your agent that it was a deer or a boar (or elk,etc).

And, if you have an incident with a cone, big-rig recap, large chunk of wood, etc ... make sure you make it clear to your insurer that it was bouncing in the road (not stationary) so it gets treated as a "falling object".

Hope you are able to work things out with your insurer.
Best of luck,
Chris

C32Mark

Thanks for you input Chris. All of the things that hit my car were moving the aframe was hit by the car in front of me and thrown in to my car and the cones and other things that hit my car were from the 60+ mph winds. Visibility was low with the pouring down rain and I was going under the posted speed limit. I believe a storm is under the act of god and out of my control. I feel it should be a comp claim. At any rate it was deemed a no fault charge.

latemodel21

Glad to hear that they see it your way and that no one was hurt.

I expected you might be past that point in your claim, but I thought I'd mention it just in case and also add it to the thread as this is good stuff to know before starting the claim process and I thought it might prove helpful to others.


also worth pointing out ... even though it is a good thing that you were,
"...going under the posted speed limit" ... the posted speed limit is for normal driving conditions and does not necessarily apply in bad weather (it is a fact that you can get a speeding ticket while going under the limit if the officer believes that the road conditions make your speed unsafe).


Your car was too nice to let it go, best of luck getting it back in pre-storm shape (and with no black marks on the title),
Chris

carguyshu

Well, in the case of the 1k deductible he would be out 1k and get the car fixed instead of getting paid $500 (after a 1k deductible and 500 to buy the car back). I had a Trans Am that got totaled by the insurance company b/c one entire side got scraped. In Kansas at least they do NOT issue a salvage title if you buy the car back from the insurance company (since the insurance company never gets the car titled to them and then retitled to you as a salvage title). I got the car fixed for less than what the insurance company gave me and pocketed the rest of the money. When I sold the Trans Am years later it was sold as a regular clean title to the next owner and the next owner did NOT have to get a salvage title. The only time a salvage title gets issued is if the insurance company takes possession of the title and car and then sells it to someone else (at least that is how it worked for me in KS years ago).

WANTED!!

Actually, I just went through this with USAA after filing my first claim with them after having been with them for 17 years. The adjuster tried to pull that BS on me. My 08 F250 which is worth $22-24k had $9k in damage with ZERO frame damage what-so-ever. The adjustor tried to tell me it was only worth $15-18k, which is funny as a month before I filed my claim I had a trade in offer of 18k on my truck. The adjustor also attempted to tell me my truck had to be totaled because a little gray box on his computer popped up and told him so. Needless to say, the rest of the conversation did not go well for him.

It seems this issue has to do not entirely with the company, but with the adjustor. They are not created equal at all. Mine caused so damned much delay by not even doing his job in a timely manner that repairs were actually delayed. I dropped my truck off for repair in November. I still don't have my truck back. He was completely unreachable by myself and the shop for over a week to even respond to estimate supplementals.

I even had an issue with them trying to force my shop to not use CAPA certified parts let alone OE or OEM parts. They got so ridiculous that to save $0.50-$1, they actually told the shop they had to get a light bulb from the other side of the country.

I had to make alot of noise but I eventually got USAA's attention and got the situation back on track. However, I will not be staying with USAA price be damned. USAA is aware of this and is trying o rectify the damage caused by this jackass adjustor. They're even giving me a credit towards my deductible because of the lousy service I've been experiencing.

So in short, no USAA is not the better option.

HeissRod

On one hand you say adjusters are not created equal, so USAA is not a better option based on service. Then you decide you will drop USAA because of the adjuster.

WANTED!!

Yes. USAA is allegedly committed to service. However, I did not get that service.

something the could be better explained is the deal with the Capa certified parts. Under their policies, cars up to 2 years old get oem parts, and older get Capa certified parts. If the part doesn't fit, sometimes USAA will authorize a part swap. I wasn't even getting that. When the adjustor was told that, he still tried to push the non certified parts instead of taking the 15 minutes it took me look up the parts and see what the shop was telling us was correct (my shop won't put absolute garbage on cars in their shop). Hell, case in point the replacement grill USAA wanted to put on my truck was some eBay crap that not only didn't say "super duty ", it didn't even have a spot for the Ford emblem.

I didn't buy cut rate insurance, or rather I thought I didn't . This experience has my wife and i really questioning that. I have comprehensive,collision, and gap. I've paid every damned cent they've wanted and then some for 3-4 vehicles at a time, homeowners, rental, life for 17 years. This isn't the first time I filed a claim, but it is the first time I filed a claim through USAA. It shouldn't be an imposition to expect your insurance to put you back on the road in a reasonable time frame and put your vehicle back in parts comparable to what was on it before the loss.

the only reason I'm even to the point of getting correct fitting parts now is because I had to essentially start a riot. Diplomacy failed as I spent over 2 weeks trying to get a hold of my adjustors and his boss. Average respone time the shop gets from other insurance companies is 2-3 business days. To get any sort of response felt like a knife fight. It took me actually grading them on their website and making the situation public before corporate took an interest and a senior executive reached out to me. It took a senior executive to make any action to happen with my claims adjustor!!!

If I'm dealing with this over a small(er) claim, Lord only knows what I'll experience should something serious happen.

To put it in simpler term, I went with USAA because I was told I was going to get superior service by a company committed to excellence. Think of my situation the same as going to Ruth Chris Steakhouse ordering a filet minion and getting served meatloaf instead.

Ls1toAMG

This is why I quit driving any car I love that was limited in production when it's wet.They are not priced fairly. To put it into perspective my e55 insurance is the cheapest of all my cars. My 99 expedition is a beater truck!!

FunkTron

Yeah, I had an experience with Allstate Ins.

got into an accident hitting front left corner, took pics as the car was flatbed towed away. When I received the quote it had additional damage that shouldn't have been there. (passenger door)
Called insurance fuming. They claimed the car damage to be over the value of the vehicle and put it as a total loss. I notified them that I had proof the damage was not there prior to it being "inspected" at the repair facility they recommended.

After all was said and done, i ended up with a total loss vehicle, bought it back for pennies on the dollar, got all repairs done for 4k, sold the car 2 months later for 8k.

while i done mind certain things....the pure hassle of DMV after getting repairs done was enough to not make me want to deal with that again.

mightar

Really sorry to hear this. I've filed claims a couple of times with USAA and I have never experienced anything you just called out here. That's really unfortunate. I have USAA for homeowners, banking, credit card, etc. and I've never had any issues with any of that. In the end though, I guess it does depend on the actual folks who are engaged in a given claim. I would think that would apply to any insurance provider though.

layzie12g

I had a CL55 that was a total loss and they tried comparing the value to a CL500.

C32Mark

So here's a little update on the progress. They had a sub contracted company come out and look at my car yesterday and we showed him the CCA report which values my car at 14,100.00 and he agreed with us and NADA on value. He went in and looked at the car and couldn't believe how good the car looked for a 2004. He took lots of photos and called today and said his estimate was 1000 higher than the shops. I have never had that happen before. I called my insurance company and the first adjuster said he received it and forwarded to the total loss department. I called them and left a message with no return call as of yet.

I did however talk to a guy who works for an agency that regulates shops and insurance companies. He said there value of my car and buy back numbers are all screwed up and they are low balling me to hopefully get me to settle like most people do. He agreed that my car is nowhere near a total loss and to stick to my guns on not letting them try to total my car. He also said buy back on a car is 20% of the value. With a 7000.00 buy back that means my car has a value of 35,000.00. That just doesn't make any sense.

hachiroku

insurance companies like Farmers throws out a stupid buy back price. Insurance companies make money off reselling your damaged cars so they do not want to sell you back the car for anything less than the high dollar of what they think they could make in auction.