Should I Wait To Repair My Vehicle Until My Personal Injury Case Is Over?

Property damage and personal injury claims are completely independent of each other. The property damage claim will move forward and settle before the personal injury claim does because you are usually still in treatment in treatment. You have a right to take your car to whatever shop you want to take it to as soon as you wish. Sometimes, they investigate liability, so it may slow a little bit on getting it paid from a third party. Still, you also could have coverage under your own insurance company that if you don’t want to wait and you want to go ahead and get it taken care of, you can use your first-party insurance to get that done, too.

What Can An Injured Party Do If They need A Vehicle While The Case Is Ongoing?

The best way to handle finding a vehicle while the case is pending is if the other person’s insurance company immediately takes responsibility and puts you in a rental car while yours is not drivable and being repaired. If they take too long, they are investigating liability, for example, and are dragging their feet, the next place they will look for you is to see if you’ve got your own rental car coverage on your insurance policy. If you do anything that your insurance company pays out for a rental car, the other person’s insurance company will get reimbursed once they accept liability. So, there are a couple of different places we can look. Then in an absolute worst-case scenario, you go and get your own rental car, and the other insurance company will pay you back for anything that you’ve spent on your own for a rental car.

What Is A Loss Of Use In Lieu Of A Rental?

A loss if use in lieu of a rental is when the insurance company doesn’t provide you a rental car when they were supposed to. You don’t just get to lose that benefit. That benefit has a monetary amount associated with it per day. So, just because they didn’t provide you a rental car, you are still entitled to financial compensation as if they did, which compensates for if you had to buy your own rental car. If you didn’t have a rental car and had to take public transportation, Uber, or pay a friend for a ride, any of that is still a loss, and you are entitled to be compensated for it.

What Is Diminished Value, And How Could That Impact Me?

Diminished value is the value of your car as if it had not been in a car accident. It is the concept that someone would pay more for the vehicle that was not involved in an accident, even if they were both presently pristine. Insurance companies don’t like diminished value claims, and there are is not much case law in Arkansas to show us how to value a diminished value claim, but it does exist.

We help with those claims as well, and we can help you get in touch with services that appraise cars and will provide diminished value reports for you. We can use that information and experts, and they will come to court if necessary to testify that there is a loss in the value of your vehicle and help us describe what that loss is to get you compensated.

What Is A Totaled Car?

In Arkansas, your car is totaled if it will cost 70% or more of the value of your vehicle to repair it. It’s like they bought your vehicle from you right before the wreck happened. They pay you the value of your car plus sales tax and registration because the idea is that they are going to give you precisely what your car is worth, plus the sales tax and registration so that you can buy that same car again and be able to pay the sales tax and registration fee on it. Often, it’s hard to find a car exactly like yours, but these are the parameters in which the law works, and that’s the fair way to handle it for everybody.

What If I Don’t Agree With The Insurance Company’s Valuation? Is There Anything I Can Do?

We always tell our clients that we have to meet proof with proof. So if we can find with Kelley Blue Book, NADA, or any other dealer that the same or similar car is valued high, we can show that to the insurance company just like we would have to show a jury. The value that the insurance company uses is not a typical value, and it’s called the actual cash value of your vehicle. Usually, when you go on Blue Book and look, you see the trade-in value, the dealer retail value, and private party value. The closest value to actual cash value is private party value, which is if you would make a personal deal to sell your vehicle to another person.

For more information on Repairing Your Car After A Car Accident, an initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling (479) 337-7077 today.