Insurance = We Lose!

It really does depend upon your insurance. Some companies are out to screw you, some aren't.

We have USAA, we've been with them since I graduated from high school. They are great! Almost every single year we've received a refund of part of a premium due to losses being lower than premiums collected as a whole - usually it's around $100 or so. Not a ton, but still a nice way to encourage people to drive safely and take precautions with their property!

We've had two claims and through them and both have been painless.

 

Haha, why do salesmen make stuff up like this? Homelink is the programmable garage door opener built into the rearview mirror.

 

This one takes salesperson stupidity to a new level. It's the rear view mirror with the built-in garage door opener. Where do they get these people?

Tom

 

Grrrr. Thanks, everyone.

 

Can you explain how the "factory immobilizer system" works?

 

Homelink can also turn on your lights in the house if you buy the $15 attachment from Radio Shack. LoJack and Homelink are not in the same league, but that's one of the best sales lines I've ever heard. Boy, would you be disappointed if your car had been stolen and you told the police "But I have Homelink!"

 

(Do you really need to know how it works?) What it does is, it makes it impossible to start the car or shift out of Park unless you have the key fob.

As for total loss: eh, whattya gonna do. There's no insurance company that will buy you a new car just like the one that got smashed. And why should they? You did have the use of the car for some amount of time and thus extracted some of the value from it.

 

GAP coverage covers the diference between what the insurance policy will pay and the amount you owe the bank, nothing more. If the insurance payout is less than or equal to what you owe, GAP will cover the difference, but things like your down payment / trade in allowance are lost. It will keep you from paying on a car that no longer exists, but won't do anything to wnsure that you can get back into a comporable vehicle. There are some insurance companies that will guarantee you a new replacement vehicle opf the same type within so many months / miles of your new purchase, but that isn't GAP.

 

OK I had the correct view of GAP coverage, I just wasn't thinking about trying to recoup my downpayment, trade in value, or "equity" paid into the car through monthly payments.

 

I got within 200 bucks of the cost of my vehicle with tax, etc after some dumb girl totaled my wife's car at the girls fault (NC). (07, touring Pack #2 or #3, 9k miles, 7 months old)

Granted, the insurance company low-balled, I said I would accept any BS offer they make as soon as they find me a used prius with less than 10k miles for the BS number they are offering. They came back in a day with basically the price I paid for it.

Best part about it, 1st week I owned it, some guy rearended me AFTER we had both stopped at a light, he gave me 800 bucks cash to fix the ever so slight bumper dent that I was worried was going to start chipping. Also wasn't reported obviously. I never got around to getting it fixed, so all in all I came out ahead and drove for free for 7+ months.

Still haven't sorted out the Insurance claim for my wife's health bills, then there that whole P&S stuff, but that's another time...

 

Besides being able to open your garage door (and it's not always easy to program!) the Homelink system allows you to turn on lights and other devices inside your home. Of course you need appropriate equipment (Smarthome.com carries this stuff.)

 

In my opinion, GAP insurance is useless on a Prius, unless you think your loan owing value might be higher than the "true market value" of your Prius. For many of us, I think that will not be true, unless you bought recently at a very high premium over MSRP.

I think my insurance company offered it for $10-20 a year when I signed up 5 weeks ago, but I declined, given the high used prices and my ability to get $1k off of MSRP here in Canada.

Yes, if it's written off soon in an accident or fire or whatever, I MAY have to fight with the insurance company a bit. They will probably do everything they can to NOT pay more than MSRP (and perhaps in Canada that is not an issue yet), but I would do everything I can to get them to pay "true market value".

TMV "True Market Value" = whatever it would take to get a similar age and mileage and condition vehicle, whether new or used. Insurance companies routinely get much better prices than we can while shopping, so perhaps they could get a new Prius here for $1-2k off of MSRP.

 

Meh.... My '06 with base trim and 21K miles was just totaled. The initial insurance valuation was $21,500, ($1500 below sticker) which is better than most cars would command. After showing them 15 listings on Autotrader.com within 200 miles of me averaging over sticker for comparable vehicles they made another offer. I accepted their second offer, which is $132 more than my out the door price for a brand new '08 with package 2 (MSRP +$600 "Doc" fee) . A lawyer friend thinks I could have gotten about $1500 more if I was persistent, and contacted the state insurance commissioner, but I felt the offer was fair.

 

My salesman went one dumber! :argue:

While going over the options for my car, he asked if I wanted LoJack. Since I had done my homework, I told him that if a thief could bypass the Engine Immoblizer, then detecting, locating and defeating LoJack would be child's play. :car:

His response: Engine Immobilizer was a safety feature that keeps the engine from intruding into the cabin during a crash! :doh:

And this from someone that claimed that he was the top Prii seller in the area!

 

That's entertaining.....
Usually the top salesman is also the top BS-er, you've got to give him that.

 

you can shop around for gap insurance, you do not have to sign up for it when you purchase the car, i dont know of any exact time limit on getting gap

lojack is not really a deterrent to car theft, because the thieves do not know you actually have it installed. since cars with lojack are not advertising that they are equipped with it, then its not really deterring anyone from stealing your car

prius cars or more susceptible to smash and grab for thier electronics, so getting a glass breakage sensor is probably a good idea.

one thing has me wondering, if my car already has an alarm then what is the difference between the $250-300 something "glass breakage sensor" and the $400 premium alarm system (rs vip), the rs vip sounds redundant unless it has some specific feature like remote start

i lock my car in the garage and cross my fingers nothing ever happens to it, i don't have gap, lojack or a gbs, but the factory alarm is enabled

if my prius is only worth right now 19,500 on a trade in (according to the blue book value) and i still owe 22k on it, i wouldn't exactly call gap worthless.

some insurance companies like geico (not sure), will sell you gap if you ask for it, they may have a time limit tho since purchase

 

i think i read somewhere it also works with those x10 units they sell at radio shack, so you could turn on and off your tv and crap

 

We use one of the buttons on our HomeLink to:
Open the garage door.
Turn on the garage lights and set various other entry lights in the house(depending on time of day of course).
At night, turn on the side and rear lights in case someone is lurking around.
Successive presses within a certain amount of time trigger additional macros for heating or cooling.

The front lights already come on at night when motion in any of the video cameras exceed a certain size and duration. Once in a while, we'll have a mid 80's beater something or rather enter our cul-de-sac in the middle of the night(we're the only house on it), inching along(what on earth are the doing?), and then the front lights come on and the car goes screeching off. I of course only know about it the next morning when I have video log alerts staring me in the face. If such activity occurs across two triangulating cameras, meaning someone or something larger than a dog or cat got to close the house, all the lights in and outside the house come on everywhere, a speech to text warning is played over the outside speakers to any intruder and a different speech to text message is directed at the occupants(us).

We actually live in very nice neighborhood, but our house was broken into 2 years ago and I went bonkers with home automation, video surveillance, alarm systems, and Homeseer to tie all the systems together.

 

Allstate offers insurance that will replace your new car with a new car rather than pay you the estimated current value of a totaled vehicle. Costs an extra $150 a year or so...