Unrecorded insurance write off.....what does that mean?

Pondy

Pondy

Muppet
 At the summit of the picturesque fens
As per the title. I am trying to find out how a car gets marked as an 'unrecorded insurance write off', as it doesn't make any sense to me.
The only information I can find is it could be unrecorded if accident damage wasn't put through as an insurance claim. But how can that be? Surely if an insurance company are not aware of any damage, how can they write a car off?
The other information I have found makes even less sense.....it could be unrecorded if damage was caused by an uninsured driver. Again, how would an insurance company write a car off if the driver was uninsured?
 
The only scenario I can imagine would be if a car had enough damage to be beyond economical repair but there was no insurance claim.

A bit like in olden days when people only had Third Party Fire & Theft cover!
 
If memory serves, a friend, several years ago, crashed his car and wanted to put it through insurance. They told him it would be written off, so he decided just to fix it himself, but because the insurance was involved in the first place, im sure it went down as an unrecorded write off.
 
I think it is called a Category U. The car could be stolen and then recovered with damage beyond feasible repair, and the owner may decline making a claim
 
You see quite a few of these on the various rebuild channels. Often very new late model cars that they have only insured third party, had a bump that's obviously beyond repair then realised the insurance wont pay out so they try and sell it to get at least some money back. Another scenario is dad lets daughter borrow new car, she crashes it then they realise she wasn't on the insurance so they can't claim. Unrecorded insurance write off isn't a real thing (Cat U is a bit different), its just made up by the sellers to give a buyer the suggestion that the car could possibly go back on the road (or be used to ring another stolen car).
 
ARCS said:
If memory serves, a friend, several years ago, crashed his car and wanted to put it through insurance. They told him it would be written off, so he decided just to fix it himself, but because the insurance was involved in the first place, im sure it went down as an unrecorded write off.
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That makes sense. As the car in question was 12 years old when this happened, and is not a valuable car, I think a tiny shunt would have been a total loss, so the owner just carried on and maybe got it repaired.
I am sure the car had an HPi after and didn't show anything. There is also no mention on the V5, so the DVLA weren't notified by anyone.
The current insurance has not flagged anything....it is cheap to insure through a mainstream company.
It's not something I have come across before, but the world of dodgy old cars is something I have managed to avoid until now! :mad:
 
Rockhopper said:
cars that they have only insured third party, had a bump that's obviously beyond repair then realised the insurance wont pay out so they try and sell it to get at least some money back.
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That is also a likely possibility, as the car was sold three days after the 'issue'.
 
Surely "unrecorded" and "insurance write off" is an oxymoron? It's either recorded as an insurance write off, or it's not an insurance write off?

Is it just an awkward (misleading) way of saying that the car had an accident and insurance companies were not involved, either because the car was not covered or the insurance company was not informed?
 
Surely it just means "
tiglon said:
Surely "unrecorded" and "insurance write off" is an oxymoron? It's either recorded as an insurance write off, or it's not an insurance write off?
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That's what I was thinking. I suppose it means "Heavily damaged & repaired but with no oversite of who did the work."
 
tiglon said:
Surely "unrecorded" and "insurance write off" is an oxymoron? It's either recorded as an insurance write off, or it's not an insurance write off?
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Exactly why I asked the question. It doesn't make any sense to me.
 
Chippie said:
With your post on ethics I presume you have bought a lemon and wondering how to move it on?
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No, not the same car. This one is a friend's who has found out his car was 'unrecorded' a year before he bought it.
 
So it's an actual categorisation by the insurance industry? In my head I was thinking in terms of people just writing the phrase on an advert as a sort of legalese description.

I wonder if body shops have to register information about large scale works? I noticed when I had a brake related MoT retest earlier this year that the figures from the brake machine were entered into some sort of web form. Since it can't be for their own amusement and I've never heard of this being a thing, perhaps there are layers of bureaucracy that we don't know about. It might explain the CarVertical type checks that (apparently) pull out all sorts of past info.
 
smorris_12 said:
perhaps there are layers of bureaucracy that we don't know about. It might explain the CarVertical type checks that (apparently) pull out all sorts of past info.
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Possibly so. The information came from a car dealer, who looked the car up. But surely the insurance industry would know all that info aswell? In this case it seems they don't which I find totally baffling.

Us punters are only told the information we need to know, or not, by the sound of it.

It seems the fact that this car is marked as 'unrecorded' means no-one will ever know what happened, as it was unrecorded. Seems stupid to me. But then there are a lot of things that I find stupid these days.
 
Are you saying the dealer looked it up and its on some database somewhere as an unrecorded write off? I know that some services like Car Vertical can track times when the car has been advertised for sale and pick words out of the advert - I bet its been through Copart at some time in its life.
 
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