Written off cars on SA roads

ASSOCIATION: WANTS ACCESS TO SALVAGE DATABASE TO CHECK STATUS OF USED VEHICLES

Insurers say data is for combating crime, not for public use.

Unsuspecting used vehicle buyers are purchasing cars without knowing they have been previously written off because the vehicle’s registration code – possibly through bribery and corruption – has not been amended to reflect this.

This has resulted in the SA Motor Body Repairers’ Association (Sambra), an association of the Retail Motor Industry Organisation (RMI), appealing to the SA Insurance Association (Saia) to allow public access to the vehicle salvage database to allow consumers to check if a vehicle has been written off before concluding a transaction.

Saia declined this request. Saia insurance risks general manager Pamela Ramagaga said the association has in the past been requested to make the Saia member vehicle salvage database public and this conversation has been ongoing for more than 15 years. “However, the same reasons we gave then are still valid today,” she said.

“The database is for Saia member consumption and has been created to combat crime that the non-life insurance industry is struggling with. It therefore was never created for public utilisation.”

Ramagaga said the database only included the one-third of vehicles in South Africa that were insured and not the twothirds of vehicles that were uninsured.

She said Saia does not believe the database is the solution but rather effective policing of vehicles that are bought and repaired after being sold – by auction houses, for example – and that these vehicles reflect the right code in line with the Saia Code of Motor Salvage.

Ramagaga stressed it was not the responsibility of the non-life insurance industry to follow-up on a correctly coded written-off vehicle that had been sold but only to ensure that all legislative process requirements in line with the code had been adhered to by the salvage agent.

She confirmed there was a regulatory obligation on insurance companies to amend a vehicle’s registration on eNatis, for instance, to Code 3 if it is written off or to Code 4 if it is irreparable and must be permanently destroyed.

Sambra has provided Moneyweb with inspection reports and photographs of two vehicles that were previously written off, subsequently poorly repaired and then sold to unsuspecting consumers.

“The lack of information available to potential buyers in the used vehicle market about previously written off vehicles is just unacceptable,” said Sambra national director Richard Green, adding that access to the register was arguably the only way used car buyers can use to check that previously written-off vehicles have been

repaired to the correct standard.

TransUnion Africa vice-president of auto information solutions Kriben Reddy said that not being able to check if a vehicle had been previously written off was a significant problem because many vehicles are being cloned. –