Years ago
I owned a VW Corrado. The 2 litre one, not the VR6, but still a nice motor. It was 5 years old when I bought it, and it cost me 10 grand.

Three or four months after I bought it, I was taking it out for a spin, like you do. Going around a roundabout on top of the M4 motorway at about 50mph (below the 60 limit on that stretch), I hit a patch of oil on the road (which was wet anyway) and spun round like a top. The front end hit the barrier stopping me from going over the edge of the bridge and down onto the motorway, then bounced me backwards so the back end hit the bridge barrier on the other side, as the car spun all the while through about 720 degrees.

Miraculously, the car was still driveable (the lights even still worked, although the glass was shattered and the offside headlamp pointed almost vertically upwards). Shaken, I drove home.

I made the claim on my insurance, and since no other car was involved (and no witnesses around), the police weren't interested. The car wasn't legally good to go, you understand, just mechanically sound, with all the damage being to lights and body panels, rather than the chassis, steering or engine/gearbox. The insurers arranged for it to be taken to a local crash repair specialist. Let's call them Breastbrush's. (Swindon locals will know who I mean.)

I phoned Breastbrush's a couple of days later, and they told me the car had been taken away and that their assessment was that it was "beyond economic repair" i.e. they'd recommended a write-off, and the car had been taken away two days earlier. The insurers hadn't contacted me at all. So my property, seemingly only worth its scrap value though it might be, was now nowhere to be found, and certainly wasn't where the insurers had told me it was.

So I phoned them in high dudgeon, demanding to know what was going on and why they hadn't informed me of my claim's progress. It turned out they'd merely moved it to a different garage for a second opinion, which was also that the car should be written off, but they'd committed such a bungle on not keeping me informed that they agreed to repair the car anyway, take the cost on the chin.

So it was that I got my car back a month or so later, and got another 13 years of happy motoring out of it. (Until I pranged it last year by going into the back of someone while gawping at another accident that had happened only moments before at that very new junction, but that's another story. Nobody was hurt - I'm an idiot, not a bastard.)
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Mon 6 Sep 2010, 14:06, Reply)