It's no secret that car insurers have a handy bag of sneaky tricks to milk more money out of their customers.
If you've ever had the misfortune of having a car written off, which sadly I have, it's likely you will have suffered one of the most financially painful.
Two separate incidents brought this trick to my mind this week.
The first was our story on car deprecation winners and losers which ranked the new cars that kept their value. Some readers questioned whether it was actually possible to bag some of the bargain cars for the prices quoted.
Then comparing quotes to renew my car insurance, an insurer placed an automatic value on my car some £2,000 lower than the £7,000 that I paid for it just last October.
As this was an already very keenly priced car that we managed to negotiate an extra £300 off, I know for a fact there is no way we could buy the same one for £2,000 less.
Sadly, if we were unlucky enough to have it written off tomorrow, through no fault of our own, we'd probably find that we would be forced to settle for the insurer's valuation, however hard we argued.
That happened to me when I had my car written off a few years ago. It was nothing flash, just a simple eight-year-old Fiat Punto, but I had owned it since it was two or three years old and it was in great condition, with low mileage, a full service history and set of bills, and would have been near the top of any potential buyer's list had they seen it.
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The insurer we had to claim off gave us an offer about £300 less than the £1,500 you would have needed to buy similar cars within 100 miles, even with some decent negotiation. Those were priced from about £1,700.
I argued our case and spoke to the loss assessor on the phone. He stuck to his guns, claiming he'd given us a good book valuation. I explained that may be the case, but similar cars for sale at this valuation just did not exist and showed him internet searches to prove this.
After forty minutes of arguing my case, he still refused to budge. In fact, he offered me what he claimed to be a friendly word of advice. That was to take the money as he wouldn't be going any higher and had probably offered me too much to begin with.
The proof we were being stung came in the fact that one of the most important things in valuing an older second hand car was never taken into account or checked. That full service history and folder full of bills proving all the work that had been done to keep it in good condition.
Ultimately, we ended up with far less than the amount you would have needed to go out and buy that car again.
I've heard similar stories from many people, including my colleague Lee Boyce, whose mum suffered a similar fate when someone wrote off her car.
Of all the car insurance catches, the deliberate low ball offers dished out on write-offs probably sees the least pressure on insurers to mend their ways.
Yet these low market valuations, and payouts that make it all but impossible to actually buy another car of a similar standard, are among the most painful tricks insurers can pull.
They are perpetuated by book values placed on cars that even the keenest car buyers can almost never achieve. Having recently sold and bought two quite different cars, an Alfa 147 hatchback and a Jaguar X Type estate, I know that the valuations I found as I was doing my research were way below what the cars actually sold for.
Wouldn't it be nice to see an insurer stick their head above the parapet and promise to pay a car's true value if it is written off? (Or make up the shortfall, if the other party at fault's insurer refused to play ball.)
That means an insurer paying out not the theoretical value listed in one of the industry's valuation books, but one that actually reflects what you as a punter could go out and buy a genuinely similar car for
At a time when insurers are struggling to come up with ways to compete on anything other than price, this may prove good for business. I for one would pay an extra £50 on my premium to sign up.
It would be nicer still if all car insurers simply paid out what a car would cost to replace as a matter of course, but I won't be holding my breath on that one.