W211 Estate Insurance Write Off

[merc_forever]

Hi

I recently had an unfortunate run in with a low bollard and as a result quite a few panels are damaged. Main damage is to drivers door, passenger door and sill panel. Car is an '05 E350 Sport with a lot of extras and only 55k miles. Insurance want to write off the car but I wont be able to get another of similar spec for the money they are offering. The repair shop the car is in suggests i negotiate with the insurance company to salvage the car and then repair using parts from a breakers. I am not against this idea but wanted to investigate the likelihood of getting parts needed. I called around a few breaking yards and few of them have w211 estates but lots of saloons. Are the doors from a saloon likely to be same part as for estate? Similar for other panels such as the sill?


Many thanks
Ryan

 

[Druk]

There's quite a few estates breaking on eBay.

e.g.

MERCEDES E CLASS W211 ESTATE E320CDI DIESEL AUTO BREAKING SALVAGE SPARES DAMAGED | eBay

 

[AMGeed]

Don't accept the first offer your insurance company make for your car.
Have a look on Autotrader, eBay and Pistonheads to try and get a good idea what a similar replacement could cost you.

Try and get the engineers report on the parts needed to repair your car and you'll know exactly what is needed if you offer to buy back the car from your insurance.
You'll have to check part numbers to see if saloon and estate bits are interchangeable.

 

[MikeInWimbledon]

Take a hard line with your insurers and don't get fobbed off with "market values" for saloons & higher mileage, badly maintained cars. They will push you with low values. You must push them with high values.

Don't let them tell you it's just a matter of waiting for a month or two for a low mileage estate car and that "they're around." They're not, these luxury estates are made in small numbers, and ones with low mileage are rare.

It will be easy to repair using quite cheap components sourced through eBay and specialist breakers but it will be expensive to get a perfect finish and the end car will still always have a low resale value because people won't want to take the risk of buying a repaired car.

Don't fool yourself that a few thousand will give you a car like new again which will have the same value as your car had before the bollard incident.

You need part numbers to check whether parts are the same. As a general rule of thumb for estates generally, the rear doors won't be the same, but the front doors might be - but only might

Estates are made in very small numbers, so your choice of components will be small, even if you're looking for "good old" brilliant silver, so the working assumption has to be that your paint shop will need to be able to match perfectly.