Quote:
Originally Posted by manchu
I've just found out my hail damaged MC mondeo wagon is a write off and am trying to work out whether to by it back.
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This has now happened to me too
Back in December my wife unfortunately got caught in a freak hailstorm during the 5-minute trip to pick up our daughter from her last day of childcare. There was lots of hand-wringing among staff and parents at the early learning centre stuck watching as their cars in the carpark got battered.
The damage on the Mondeo is fairly light and from a distance isn't obvious at all, but the car is covered in little dings all over. Up close the ripples in the panels become apparent. Luckily none of the glass or lights got broken.
I had it comprehensively insured, but awkwardly the damage coincided with when we were packing to move interstate from Canberra to Dubbo and it took some time to get assessed for repair. It got assigned three times to different repairers and while the first valuator was positive about our chances, the result after the final one was that it was a write off. Car was insured for $14,050 agreed value, and the word from the assessor during his inspection was it would be pretty close to that amount to fix up.
I didn't want to lose the vehicle as the payout wouldn't be close to get us into the kind of vehicle we'd want to replace it (which would not be like-for-like, we'd be aiming for something newer and probably like a minivan). I had the vehicle checked over by a mechanic and it received a perfect bill of health mechanically so I took the buyback option to keep it on the road for $2,700.
For even more fun times, while all this was going down I got involved in a minor fender-bender after we moved to the new town and had another insurance claim in (not at fault). I ended up getting a new repainted bumper, left guard and passenger front door with the rest of car sporting hail dents, lol.
Took me some searching to find this thread again. I see I mentioned the PDR and I ended up getting a kit from eBay some time ago. It's sat unused for years and now I've got hundreds of dings to learn on! LOL!