INSURANCE RIP-OFF

I’ve been part of the motor trade for the past 15 years and something which really bothers me is the greed of the insurance companies. In the old days, when a car was costly to repair after an accident, the car was literally written off, including on the paperwork side, meaning someone who bought the car to repair it had to reintroduce the vehicle on the system and the paperwork showed “rebuilt/built-up” or, in today’s terms, a code three. This protected buyers from a practice that is now very common.

As you most likely know, code three cars could not be financed and, to a degree, not insured for the full market value. It is a known fact rebuilds are worth far less than normal code two/used status cars at resale. This applies to the scrapped car the insurance firms resell. This makes cars also less likely to be fixed (rather broken up for spares) and definitely safer for the public.

So, the insurance companies have done away with “scrapping” cars. They sell write-offs to whomever wants to repair these cars as normal code two/ used vehicles, getting more money and making it viable for these cars to be fixed. They get repaired and pop up on dealership floors, in classifieds and on auction floors as regular used vehicles.

The insurance companies are playing a big part in this. I call it a scam of fixing cars that have been written off and reselling them. If you are not savvy, or the repairs are done very well (on the surface at least), you might be driving one of these cars now. How would you ever know if it was repaired properly? RIAAN VAN WYK Pretoria