Hi chaps,
My E39 BMW 530i Sport has been written off. The insurance company initially offered me £2,750 on Wednesday. I told the guy on the phone to find me a car that matched the spec of my car for that amount. We then searched AT together, and he found a one owner car pretty much the same miles as mine for £2,850. We then found another up at £3.4K odd. I was aiming for £3.5K, the 'engineer' suggested that they could probably go to £3K dead (which I wasn't happy with). He told me he'd speak to his manager.
My car was a Sport auto with sunroof, 18" M Parallels, one previous owner to me, 114K miles, FSH, all the usual gubbins apart from nav, recent money spent on the cooling system, recent ABS module replacement etc, so quite a good example.
I then went about finding as many similarly specced cars as I could, all with similar mileage and ended up with 13 what I would call similar enough to count towards my case. Many of these cars had nav, none have the sunroof, and not all of them had the 18" M Parallels. The average mileage came out at 118K, average value at £3.5K, and the average age at 6 months older than my car. I created a spreadsheet with all this info and links to all the cars, and emailed it to the 'engineer'. Spreadsheet screenshot below:
I received a call today, and was told that they won't budge on their offer of £3K. I was not particularly happy TBH, but accepted. I did argue with the guy that whilst many of the cars had nav, none had the sunroof and not all had the 18" Parallels. He used the excuse that sunroofs can't be a popular option, and that they're unreliable and leak so are undesirable. I went back at him with the argument that 10 year old nav is going to be a load of crap anyway (by today's standards at least), but he wouldn't budge.
Now I think I have done the wrong thing and given up too easily. The whole thing seems to be hinged on one AT advert for the one owner car I previously mentioned, which seems to be the exception rather than the rule for value.
Should I have given up so easily?
My E39 BMW 530i Sport has been written off. The insurance company initially offered me £2,750 on Wednesday. I told the guy on the phone to find me a car that matched the spec of my car for that amount. We then searched AT together, and he found a one owner car pretty much the same miles as mine for £2,850. We then found another up at £3.4K odd. I was aiming for £3.5K, the 'engineer' suggested that they could probably go to £3K dead (which I wasn't happy with). He told me he'd speak to his manager.
My car was a Sport auto with sunroof, 18" M Parallels, one previous owner to me, 114K miles, FSH, all the usual gubbins apart from nav, recent money spent on the cooling system, recent ABS module replacement etc, so quite a good example.
I then went about finding as many similarly specced cars as I could, all with similar mileage and ended up with 13 what I would call similar enough to count towards my case. Many of these cars had nav, none have the sunroof, and not all of them had the 18" M Parallels. The average mileage came out at 118K, average value at £3.5K, and the average age at 6 months older than my car. I created a spreadsheet with all this info and links to all the cars, and emailed it to the 'engineer'. Spreadsheet screenshot below:
I received a call today, and was told that they won't budge on their offer of £3K. I was not particularly happy TBH, but accepted. I did argue with the guy that whilst many of the cars had nav, none had the sunroof and not all had the 18" Parallels. He used the excuse that sunroofs can't be a popular option, and that they're unreliable and leak so are undesirable. I went back at him with the argument that 10 year old nav is going to be a load of crap anyway (by today's standards at least), but he wouldn't budge.
Now I think I have done the wrong thing and given up too easily. The whole thing seems to be hinged on one AT advert for the one owner car I previously mentioned, which seems to be the exception rather than the rule for value.
Should I have given up so easily?
Last edited:
![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
