ian65 wrote:gt_james wrote:What is vcar?
gt_james wrote:so Cat A or B, C or D
yeah, the vehicle condition alert register..... not all cat D cars go on it but most cat C cars certainly will be...
the only exceptions sometimes being where an owner had repaired the car themselves and not gone through the insurance or the car belonged to a hire company like Hertz who self insure their vehicles..... even then the police attending the accident would likely submit a V23 if the car was heavily damaged and so the car would still go on the register.
Once a car is on V-CAR it's on for life and is impossible to get off. This greatly impacts it's value as dealers don't want to touch them and the public usually run a mile from them.
It was brought in to try to stop dodgy characters from putting written off ( and potentially dangerous) cars back on the road and also to tackle the rising car theft problem and car ringers.
Cat C cars were the main problem. Cat A's & B's wouldn't get a new log book but cat C's were heavily damaged to the point that they were beyond economical repair. They could go back on the road though so it was very tempting for rogues to just nick an identical model and ring it with the cat C writeoff.
With these cars being on the register it gave the police a fighting chance to detect this. Cars used to be written off if the cost of the repairs exceeded more than 2/3 the value of the car... it's now if the repairs exceed the full value.
If the police run a nearly new car worth say £25k through the computer and it comes back as on vcar then that car has had over £20K+ worth of damage done to it and yet there it is, looking brand new, driving down the road. 20 grand is a lot of damage so they'd want to have a good look at that car to make sure it wasn't a ringer.
Going back to this blue RX7 D792YLK, when it was written off back in around 2012, at the time it was probably only worth about £1200 so it wouldn't take much damage to it to write it off. The insurance company would base the repair cost on main dealer prices and by the time they'd bought a bonnet, new wing, nose cone, bumper, lights and then paint and labour it would have easily been more than the car was worth.
Unfortunately, it was written off and given a cat C so even if it was restored to make it the best RX7 in the world, it will always be on vcar and so will never be worth anywhere near as much as a car that isn't on the register. You can't restore its history.
It actually had quite a bang and although it was mainly panelwork I'd still want to have a good look at the chassis rails for kinks and to check the door gaps.
Buying a VCAR is ok if you know what you're getting into.... I've bought a couple in the past just to blast about in but you need to buy them cheap, enjoy them without pouring any more money into them and then sell them cheap. Insurance companies don't like to insure them and the police love to pull them.
When you say insurance companies don't like to insure them, I had no idea you need to declare that to insurance companies. Also, these days car insurers write off everything, definitely cat D/C cars that have minor damage. my mate had a seat ibiza, had a bump on a roundabout, needed a bumper and a wing, and an airbag and they wrote it off!
