A Big Surprise To Find Car Is Cat C, 3 Years After Purchase!

[philfingers 5]

A mate of mine has a car, bought in 2002. He's trying to sell it and a prospective buyer says it's down as cat C, which was news indeed to the seller.

So we checked. He bought it June 2002 and it was registered as Cat C in June 2005! the car hasn't been damaged since he owned it. The only thing we can think of is it's been cloned, yet he gets it MOTd every year, gets the tax reminders, insurance etc with no issues.

Any thoughts other than ours which are WTF! How did it get down on the register over 3 years after he bought it!

[dcc 855]

wrong VIN plate on HIS car?

[Anthony 1,003]

Someone at the insurance company made a mistake would be my guess.

 

It is possible to get it changed if a mistake has been made, although I suspect that he'll have to jump through plenty of hoops...

[NeilGTi85 5]

Getting mot, tax & insurance is still possible on a cat c without the vic check at DVlA.

 

It's either been cloned or there's been a mistake at DVlA, you can ask the DVlA which insurance company declared it as cat c and give them a call.

[philfingers 5]

A mate of mine who's reasonably well connected in the police is going to do some digging tomorrow for me. they have a direct line to DVLA so should get an answer quickly. Will let you know when i find out more, it's an interesting one for sure!

[jackherer 543]

Did you get anywhere with this Phil? My brother in law is selling his Golf VR6 and the buyer has pulled out under exactly the same circumstances, the HPI check says it was written of when my brother in law had it and it definitely wasn't. He bought the car off a friend who had owned it for years so he knows the history going back a long way.

[philfingers 5]

it turns out when the vehicle was registered some 16-17 years ago they only used the last 6 digits of the VIN. I went back to mycarcheck.com who we did the check with and they said that it looked like it was a mistake as it was a company car that was written off. Basically when the car was registered it wasn't uncommon then to just use the last 6 digits of the VIN, basically the car that was written off also had those same 6 digits in and that's why 'our' car is now 'CAT C', somehow the computer tagged mine as it uses wholly the number in the write off's VIN. The guy told me it could apply to 60-70 other vehicles!

Now they offered to open an Insurance Investigation whioch would cost £20, if succesful then the the record would be changed but if not I would get my £20 back. However he did say that the issue may not be resolved as it's 7 years old and could be buried in archives!

However I've since been told that it may be worth going to trading standards as the records that are kept for 'our' vehicle is incorrect and hence is devaluing it- could be against the data protection act too possibly i suppose. Or the option would be to go to the Insurance Ombudsman. All in all tho it's a lot of trouble for something that's not 'our' (my mates- i'm dragged into it!) fault.

[jackherer 543]

It does sound like a lot of hassle, so it depends how much the car is worth I suppose. My brother in laws Golf is only worth about £600 so it's hard to justify spending much time/effort/money on it.

[Henry Yorke 269 3 Cars]

If you have an email back stating that then that may be a suitable to convince the buyer. I wouldn't be too worried on a sub £1000 car, but if it was a £10k BMW then I would want it cleared up or walk away

[muddatrucker 125]

Sounds like you've literally got nothing to lose.

[jackherer 543]

I spoke to my brother in law earlier today, he has sold his car now, he let it go for "considerably less than" the £600 he was asking which already seemed cheap to me for a perfectly good Golf VR6.

[sensualt101 31 1 Cars]

that really is awful! imo insurance companies have far too much power in the 1st place and if proved to be at fault what right do they have to charge anybody to change their records? isnt it bad enough that they devalue a car without foundation? i was once charged a cancellation fee by admiral when they cancelled my policy NOT me! total robbery and the ombudsman needs to sort them out big time!

[P_Monty 2]

Hmm a colleague at work has just had this. After an accident last week, they've greatly reduced the payout on his landy as it was written off round 10 years ago (err... no it wasn't ....)

[DanteICE 72]

I used to work in Salvage and we dealt with too many insurance companies to count and they are all useless. We had one company who were based in Ireland but insured cars in the UK and because they were Ireland based they didn't need to mark any cars off with the DLVA; so we had Cat B cars which were unregistered damage. The system is so badly broken. They can change your cars status without even thinking about it, but changing it back is like they've been told to walk up a mountain with six sizeable bags of shopping! Keep pestering and annoying them and they just give up in the end; that's what my boss did with some of the cars we bought in good faith of lower valuations (i.e. we were told it would be a Cat D and it turns out to be a Cat C).

 

Geoff

[Spiky 37]

Someone at the insurance company made a mistake would be my guess.

 

It is possible to get it changed if a mistake has been made, although I suspect that he'll have to jump through plenty of hoops...

 

this is probably bang on the money, my mrs had a 306 derv, and it came up as a cat c/d, when we rung the people with database,they said it's actually a mistake and removed it, all sorted