Car Insurance Claims Evaluation in California
Reader’s Question:
Why did my vehicle insurance company here in California send this “adjuster” guy to my uncle’s shop? They already have a list of the repairs that he made to my car, so why are they bothering to send another guy?
Mei
San Jose, CA
A vehicle insurance company in California, and anywhere else in the U.S. for that matter, will send adjusters or appraisers to double check and evaluate the insurance claims to see if they’re reasonably priced.
Basically, adjusters step in as “arbiters” who provide the final say when it comes to estimating the cost of vehicle repairs in a shop. Their estimate is what the vehicle insurance company will bank on to prevent the contracted repair shop from overcharging the costs of repairs.
Don’t feel threatened by adjuster: it’s his or her job to estimate the cost of repairing the damage to your car, investigate liability in the accident and generally work for your benefit. You’ll have no problems as long as your uncle’s auto repair shop is playing by the rules. If you have photos or videos of your car’s damages before being repaired, present them to the adjuster for extra proof of the extent of damage.
On the flipside, it may be the adjuster who’s over-charging for repairs, so you may want to consider asking the adjuster to make a comprehensive breakdown of the expenses to check and confirm his or her estimates. Be especially careful if the adjuster is a staff adjuster who works for your vehicle insurance company.
Also, you may want to wait until the adjuster arrives before repairing your car the next time you get into an accident. Both the adjuster and your uncle can then make proper estimates together so neither of them will have problems with over or underestimating the extent of damage to your car.
Auto Insurance Claims – The Other Party Does Not Accept Blame?
Reader question:
When the owner of an auto insurance policy in California who crashed into your car doesn’t want to take the blame, what do you do?
Mark
Thanks for asking, Mark.
Sometimes a person will be completely apologetic at the scene of the car accident, but when it comes time to file a claim with their auto insurance policy in CA, you find that they’ve told a whole other story to their car insurance company. The company that sells his auto insurance policy is going to go with his story unless forced to believe otherwise, because they want to pay the least money and stick by their policy holder. If it’s your fault, then they don’t have to pay anything.
Normally this happens when an accident hasn’t had a police report filed for it. There’s a good reason for calling the cops every time right there. However, sometimes even when a police officer comes, they don’t file a report. Why is that? It’s because if the police officer believes the damages of the accident to be $500 or less, then it isn’t necessary to file one. However, what might seem like only a little bit of damage at the time could be worth several thousand dollars at the mechanic.
While you might try to convince the police officer to follow a report, it’s not something that you can reasonably do. Instead, do things yourself. Ask witnesses and get their statements about the accident, get the other driver’s statement about the accident, and make sure you take your vehicle to a repair shop as soon as possible so that the damages can be checked out and no one can say that they didn’t come from that accident.
Make sure you get names and numbers of the witnesses, as well as the name, number, and policy number of the other driver. Take pictures of the vehicles, and if there is a police report filed, you can get a copy.
If the auto insurance policy still gets you a no to your claim, you can get more serious. Go to small claims court with the other driver, or even get an attorney. Make sure that they can’t push you around.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.
California Car Insurance Fraud – Crappy Auto Repairs Cost You Money
I think that, after reading a report that says that over fifty percent of auto repairs performed in the state of California are overpriced, the necessity of the California auto repair bill of rights comes to seem even more important. These statistics are mostly the result of fraud, which sends California car insurance rate rising. If you are more aware of your abilities to report fraud and are more aware of the repair process so that you can spot it, then you can help this rate of fraud drop, and along with it your California car insurance rate.
According to the organization that performed the study, of around five hundred cars that were checked after they had been fixed, almost half of the repairs that were done on them were not even requested–they were, essentially, repairing things that weren’t even broken. Now, it may not seem like too big of a deal, but consider the fact that of those, the normal price paid for these unnecessary repairs is almost five hundred dollars.
Every year in the state of California, over three billion dollars are paid out for repairs from car insurance accident claims. Of that amount, over six million dollars are from unnecessary repairs. The average amount of the unnecessary repair in most vehicles is one fifth of the total claim amount. Eliminating this extra spending on fraudulent repairs could cause a sharp decrease in the average California car insurance rate for policy holders.
If you want to have your own car that has recently been repaired under a car insurance claim, you can call the Bureau of Auto Repair and have it inspected. In order to qualify, the claim amount must be $2,500 or above, and the repairs have to have been done recently, within the last four months since the repairs.
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