Advice on Insurance Claims / FIR After car sale but Before name transfer

[herculesksp]

If you have been following my new car(Pista) thread, you would have known that I sold my old car - M800, else now you know.

So, I sold the car to my colleague's Husband who wanted to take it to Udupi and register it there in his father's name. I signed all the papers and handed them over to him. Once he gets the papers signed by his dad, he would hand over the copies to me. Since he is a known person, I trust him to do this fairly.

However, this Saturday morning, while he was driving out of Bangalore, a lorry hit the car near Mekhri circle and smashed most of the left side of the car. They wanted to settle it out of the Police Station, but then the circumstances changed and they had to file a FIR. Now the car and the insurance is still in my name and the Mandovi guy(who his handling the accident repairs), who is also well known to the buyer, has asked for our signature on the insurance papers to process the claims. The buyer will be taking up the repairs not covered by the insurance at his own cost.

Now all this is fine, and I trust the buyer since he is a friend, but I am wary of the other involved parties. Since the car is still under my name, will the insurance company involve us in this entire thing? For verification and such?

Among the things in favour of me, I have the delivery note signed on the 20th of last month. I have the CC issued by the RTO on 31st and this mentions the prospective buyer too. So until the time I have sold the car, I have nothing against my name, or my car.

Of course, I am sure the buyer wont cause any problem, but I just want to be aware of the implications on this in case the police or insurance company decide to get deeply involved.

[MX6]

Not sure about other legalities, but I feel that your no claim benefit on the insurance effectively goes for a toss.

[sdp1975]

There should not be any insurance problems. Is there any third party damage - is the lorry fellow claiming damage from you ?

What exactly does the FIR say ?

[herculesksp]

@MX6: My new car anyway has insurance provided by my company(its in my company's name). So I can't transfer my NCB to this. Hence I am not contesting the claim.

@sdp: I don't know the exact statement of the FIR, but basically the lorry owner didn't care what these guys do and he refused to pay anything out of his pocket. The lorry was at a high speed and went on to hit a piller of the Mekhri circle flyover. As per the new owner, the police was telling something about payment for damage of public property, but I don't see how this can be taken out of my insurance since the car didn't touch even the divider.

The new owner seems to have some good contacts, using which he filed the FIR without the anyone giving too much trouble. I don't expect something that he can't handle, but I want to be prepared no matter what since after all I am the insurance owner.

[sdp1975]

So it seems that it was more the fault of the lorry driver rather than the car drivers. I don't think anyone can really trouble you - neither the police nor the insurance. It looks like that the police will file a case against the lorry driver for damage of public property using the FIR.

In accidents , the driver of the car - and not necessarily the owner - can get into legal trouble.

The insurance should not be a problem either since you have the FIR. Most likely the claim will get sanctioned by the surveyor without any problems in this case - unless the claim is enormous . How much is the repair estimate ?

[herculesksp]

@sdp: that's a relief to hear.
What qualifies as enormous on a ~1.5 lac net worth car? The mandovi guy estimates a damage of upto 20,000. I don't know how much of that is sheet metal and how much plastic/glass. The damage was to the left side of the bonnet(headlights, bonnet and I assume bumper and side panel too), left doors were scraped past and left rear panel was also damaged.

The amount of damage sounded scary and it is a relief that my friends were safe without even a scratch.

[sdp1975]

20 K is not much - besides insurance will pay only part of it and you the rest.

I don't think you'll have problems claiming the insurance or any trouble from their end. I assume you have maruti insurance and from what I've heard they're generally hassle free.