Poor Beth

A few weeks ago I was involved in an accident on the freeway on my way home. Traffic had come to a hault and I was stopped in my lane. I looked in my rear-view mirror and see a truck come barreling towards me trying to swerve to miss me. He was traveling too fast and too close to miss me but instead of hitting me straigt on he only hit my driver side rear bumber. Fortunately nobody was hurt, but it did do quite some damage to my little Beth. You may remember my tribute to Beth when she turned 200,000 miles. Now 3,500 miles later she has been totaled out.





The other driver's insurance decided that my little Beth wasn't worth fixing. Part of the problem was that not only did the driver smash in the rear driver side when he did so it bent the frame, which can be costly to fix. After reviewing the pictures that the adjuster took our claims specialist decided that our vehicle was worth $2,200.

WHAT?!?

Our vehicle was worth more than that and there is now way we can replace our vehicle for $2,200 dollars. After much discussion back and forth I forwarded comparables from our area. They came back with $2,600.

SERIOUSLY?!?

About this time Jon and I getting very frustrated. Beth never had any major problems and we weren't planning on getting rid of her anytime in the near future. Jon spoke to our claims lady and told her that $2,600 was unacceptable and they needed to reevaluate the valuation of our car. She told Jon that in my comparables that I had included dealer sales and as we all know dealers make more money on car sales that "for sale by owner" vehicles. She explained that our car was not dealer ready. Jon responded with "of course it's not dealer ready, you client rear ended our vehicle and if you want we will vacuum our car and spray new car smell into it to be dealer ready." That was basically the end of their conversation. The next day I wrote our claims lady a lengthy fax stating our position again and that had we not been so carelessly rammed into we wouldn't be in this situation and wouldn't have to spend our time dealing with this. I included more comparables this time they were all "for sale by owner." The claims lady called me back the next day and said that they had done another valuation based on my comparables and they were ready to offer $3,800 - now that was more like it. We accepted their offer with the option to buy the vehicle back for $400 and are now glad to have it settled. We hope to be able to sell Beth in the near future and hope she can make someone else as happy as we were with her.