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How is your Total Loss Gap Insurance Claim calculated?

The way in which your total loss gap insurance claim is calculated is unlike anything else in the world of gap insurance as our policy takes into account market forces.

Once this has been done they will then compare which way of settling your claim would be the higher. This will mean taking into account how you paid for your vehicle and the invoice and replacement cost.

To illustrate what this means lets have a look at how a settlement would be dealt with. Please also remember that if you have purchased a vehicle using a form of finance where you cannot take full ownership, for example contract or lease hire, (this must mean that ownership will pass directly to you and not to a third party), any settlement will be based on the cost of the amount outstanding on finance.

Lets say for illustration purposes that you have just purchased a new Volkswagen Golf 1.6 diesel 5 door Match on a form of personal contract purchase where at the end of three years you have the option to either pay an optional final payment, or you can hand the vehicle back and walk away or part exchange it and use any equity against the cost of another vehicle.

The price of your new car with extras you want is £21,500. You drive a hard bargain and even get a Volkswagen deposit contribution because of the way that you are financing it.

For two years you have reliable uneventful driving until one day you return to the supermarket car park to find a space where your Golf used to be. You inform your insurance company and after their period of grace which can be just a few days they declare your vehicle "stolen and not recovered". They then offer you the value of your vehicle at the time.

The amount they offer you for this illustration does not matter and we have presumed that you have wisely decided to protect yourself with a form of Total loss Gap Insurance. You then inform our claims team who liaise with your own insurance company and agree a settlement.

At this point our claims team would ask for an up to date settlement and a copy of your original invoice. They would also contact a number of Volkswagen Dealerships and research the current market to see what the current sale price is for exactly the same car as yours was on the day that you first drove it home. At this point they would be able to take an average of the dealership prices for a direct replacement or they would be given the superseding model's price.

The claims team would now have all three values, the amount on finance, the invoice price and direct replacement cost. They would simply top up your insurance companies settlement to whichever figure was higher. If that is the replacement cost so be it. If Volkswagen have a special promotion on and the replacement cost is lower then the settlement would be based on the original invoice price. If your claim happened very early on and with interest the amount outstanding on finance was higher then settlement would be based on the amount outstanding on finance.

From your two insurance companies you would now have the higher amount. From this you could clear any finance and the balance would be yours to spend as you see fit.

If you had paid for your vehicle using cash or savings or a personal loan which is not linked to your vehicle you would simply be paid the full cash amount.

So which way your claim is handled depends entirely on whichever amount is higher and consequently whichever is best for you. At Total loss we do not want you to have to pick one of three policies instead we want you to benefit from all of them.