Ongoing saga of the car - some good news for once!

My long-running saga with my trusty Nissan Primera continues after the car was smashed in the rear last November.

I got the car back from the repairers a couple of weeks ago but was not at all happy with the repairs. Outside everything looked perfect but inside the boot-well there was clear signs that it'd been involved in an accident. There were crease lines in the metal, lots of filler where bits of metal had been cut out and then welded back in and the spray painting was a different colour on the new metal than the old metal.

In short it was definitely going to reduce the car's eventual resale value. Given that the accident hadn't been my fault I wasn't going to accept it like this.

I phoned my insurance company up and told them the problems and they said they'd tell the garage to come and collect it, take some more photos, then their engineers would decide what to do.

A week later having heard nothing I phoned them up and they suggested that I take the photos for their engineers. Fortunately I had already taken some so I sent them off and waited.

Few days later they emailed me back to suggest that I take it up with the garage !!

Argh. Phoned them up and made it quite clear that as they'd arranged the work then it was up to them to sort out the problems with the garage.

Result! The garage phoned back the next day, said they understood I wasn't happy, and booked it in for re-repair.

Of course I had to wait yet another week and a half before they had a repair slot, and on Tuesday this week I took it in for repair (again).

And the good news out of all this ?

Today I received two cheques from my insurance company with repayment of the £300 excess that I'd had to pay and £242 for when I had to hire another car from Hertz to go to France. I wasn't expecting these cheques from my insurance company, thought I'd have to claim them directly off the 3rd party - so a small bit of good news.

My insurance company also said in the letter that they've closed the case as they've had full reimbursement from Zurich insurance so now I have to get my no claims bonus re-instated and then hopefully get my car back next week with all the repairs done properly ....