Vehicle insurance diminished value
The Automotive Service Association, also known as the ASA, has some strict requirements when it comes to having car insurance companies repair a vehicle after it has been involved in a collision. The organization is one of only many to state that it is the sole responsibility of the vehicle insurance company to bring the vehicle that it is insuring back to its pre accident condition. This means that the repair shops which it hires to do the work should be held up to the highest standards. They should:
- always use the best materials, and this applies to both physical materials and actual labor. Specialists should be brought in when they are required for the best result, and the best paints and things such as that should be utilized.
- Welders that are working for the repair shop on the car should be of the best kind, with lots of experience and a good welding record. They should only weld a car according to the specifications issued by the car’s original maker.
- The people who are repairing the car should do everything that they can to find out everything with the car that has gone wrong, to the point of perfection.
The ASA is very hard on the point of repairing these cars to their former condition. They say that everything that is possible to do, every action that is possible to take should be taken towards making sure that these cars are as they were when they came out of the factory.
However, according to many advocates of the vehicle insurance companies, there’s no way that this process could work. No matter what these body shops do, it isn’t possible to repair a car so well that it is just like it was when it started out. It can’t be done. The repairers can try as hard as they want, but in the end they end up altering the process in some way so that while the car may be as good as it was, it is not the same, and any kind of difference no matter how positive has an effect on the value of the car itself.
The reason that this is, is because the makers of these car models have the resources to design them to perfection. They have machines, expensive ones, which are able to do the job of aligning parts perfectly or of getting all of the paint even and of the same exact color. The repair shops don’t have enough money to get all of that equipment, so there’s no way they could complete the same work as the manufacturer, even with the same amount of skill. These people who repair cars do their work with their bare hands, and unlike machines, hands can make mistakes. They have to use their eyes, and so they can only make a car as good as it looks to their bare vision. For most people, this would be okay, it would look fine, but for a professional appraiser of vehicles, they can tell even the slightest difference, and that will cause a significant price drop.
Even the people that due see diminished value as a problem that car insurance companies should be responsible for don’t believe that the company should automatically hand over the money for diminished value to everybody who gets into a car crash with that company. You can’t assume diminished value, they say. If you want recompense for the problem then you have to have actual proof that you tried to go out on the market and sell it for the valued price. However, whatever the case, they think that people who have vehicle insurance should know about the existence of diminished value, whether they need it or not. It says a lot, they say, that back in the day car insurance paid often for diminished value although they don’t anymore. Why is that?
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.
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