In Need of Help Please

[atif_farooq]

Hi guys. Apologies if this topic has been posted in the wrong forum (moderators please move if necessary). As the title of the topic suggests I'm in need of some help and quite urgently. Please do bare with me as the story might be quite detailed.

I took delivery of a new Mini JCW in September '09 so the car is approximately 5 months old. Since then I seem to have attracted the worst possible luck and am at a point now where I am in dire need of some assistance or guidance as to what I need to do to have the situation resolved. Two months after taking delivery I was involved in an accident in which a white van driver pulled out of a junction straight in to my car. Luckily he wasn't travelling very fast and the damage to the vehicle was approximately £2000. This damage was only to the body work, more specifically the driver side door and wing. In the accident the car was shunted approximately a metre or two, and this may have led to the problem I will come to shortly. I went through insurance the other party had to accept liability and therefore my insurance no claims bonus remained intact as all costs where recovered from the other drivers insurance company.

Fast forward to about 3 weeks ago and the car started to give me engine problems for which the car had been booked in. There was also a slight whining noise that had started to appear when I turned the steering wheel either side. I was to have this checked out in the same booking. Last Monday I was driving home in the morning down a narrow road, doing no more than 15mph. I approached a bend and as I did so I slowed down ever so slightly and turned the steering wheel but there was a slight grinding noise and the car didn't turn. As the road was narrow I wasn't able to stop completely and my front right tyre collided with the kerb, and the car followed through so that the rear tyre then also hit the kerb. This caused some pretty bad damage to both alloy wheels, which in all honestly will need to be replaced rather than repaired. When I got out the car I noticed that the steering column wire had snapped. On closer inspection the column was rusted quite badly, and it seems this had been fractured previously (either on delivery, or in the previous accident). The recovery vehicle driver also agreed completely with me, as did one of the members of public who helped me load the vehicle on to the pavement after the incident.

The car was taken to BMW Sytner Birmingham and a day after the incident they called me to advise that they believed the steering column snapped AFTER the collision with the kerb . Needless to say I was absolutely gutted at this. They told me the damage alone was £2000 in parts. I wanted an independent engineer to assess the vehicle, and they told me I would need to go through my insurance company to arrange this. I have since logged the accident with my insurance and the car has been taken to Birmingham Oldbury where an estimate of the damage was made on Friday. They are now awaiting an engineer to be sent from my insurance company (Mini Insurance) to assess the damage.

I feel like this is all going to turn out badly and the engineer will just accept the value of the damage and I will lose my NCB and no one will see that the steering column was rusty and snapped, rather than was damaged after the collision with the kerb. Can anyone please be kind enough to advise what steps I can take to try and prevent this? I am gutted that I have a five month old Mini which I spent £27000 on and this is how things have turned out.

Thanks for reading.

Atif

[MACKIT]

Atif...sorry to hear about your misfortune. This is a difficult one for someone to help with. It seems that you are entering a "someones word against anothers" battle.

I think you will need to see what the independent engineer reports before making a judgement. I'm unsure if at this stage someone can say when the damage was caused, i.e. before you purchased it or during your first accident. They may well be able to determine if your second accident would have caused this damage and if not this might lead them to believe that this was a pre-existing issue. Thus, much of the damage might be attributable to a previous incident. The problem is...which incident? If you have closed the claim with the van driver then can you reopen this and claim damage for the steering column??? This seems a bit of a nightmare and although it's not what you want to hear you may have to swallow the loss of your no claims.

Perhaps it is a warning to all of us to have our car's thoroughly inspected by a 3rd party following an accident to perhaps identify any issues that may have been ignored during repairs.

I hope you get the outcome you want.