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Gap Insurance


benson01
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Anyone know about this? I've never heard of it before, but Honda are offering me the chance for £370 to insure my car to it's full retail value for three years. So if it gets pinched in Year 3 of ownership I would get the full £12.5k back instead of £5k. This also applies to writeoffs etc. Sounds pretty good to me, but does anyone know if it can be had for less. It runs on top of your regular insurance, not instead of it. Any info appreciated. Ta.

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I have GAP insurance for my R32 . I was told if the car was stolen or written off within the three years they would pay the difference on what the insurance company up to the cost of what i paid for the R32. There was a max payout of £12,000 . It cost me just over £300 to cover the three years.

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I got 3 years Gap insurance through the VW dealer when I bought my R32.

I paid £349 for it and it says it pays out upto a maximum of £15000 on top of the payout from your normal car insurers (Admiral in my case) to make up the total invoice value from when the car was purchased.

I know if i hadn't paid cash for the car, the Gap insurance works differently in that the payout is only to make up any shortfall in your insurers payout against what you still owe on the finance agreement.

Ash.

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Yep. Pays the difference between insurance payout in case of a write-off or unrecovered theft and list price, as said above. Just make sure you know what the maximum payout is. In my experience this is always a limited amount.

Edited to say: I didn't know about it only paying off the finance you still owe - interesting.

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[ QUOTE ]

See my earlier post - there are usually two types of insurance (incidentally, BMW gap insurance has no limit because a friend took it out on Thursday of last week and it was a major concern of his - but the documents confirm no limit at all...on his 645Ci...).

[/ QUOTE ]

Indeed, read your doco very carefully.

When we bought the Volly they tried to sell us GAP, we said no thanks, I did ask "was this becasue the value of the car is going to drop like a stone ?". Salesmuppet was not too pleased at that comment grin.gif

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[ QUOTE ]

I didn't know about it only paying off the finance you still owe - interesting.

[/ QUOTE ]

To be honest, I didn't realise this either until after I took out the policy. Luckily I don't have finance so I'd get the full amount (I hope!).

Sounds a bit crap though doesn't it? If you put down say a £10k deposit and took the rest on finance, you'd be lucky to get any payout at all! You'd be relying on the car being worth less than bugger all if it was stolen after say 2 years due to the deposit and the amount you had already paid off - if you understand what I mean?

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As M3Me's said there is usually more than 1 type of policy offered. I know that Audi do 2. The following is taken from Audi's web site.

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GAP (Shortfall Protection)

This covers the difference between the amount paid by your insurance company and the balance of the outstanding finance agreement, up to a maximum of £10,000.

GAP Plus (Return to Invoice)

This covers the difference between the amount paid by your insurance company and the cash purchase price paid for your vehicle, up to a maximum of £15,000. This payment will help you replace your vehicle with a new vehicle of the same or similar specification.

Both of these payments are in addition to your insurance claim settlement and are available for new and used vehicles.

[/ QUOTE ]

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I know it happens regularly, and here is why:

The salesman told me. I rang him because my friend hasn't bought from the same dealer I do, so I rang him to check out the Gap details for my friend. He said check which Gap was being offered but that as it was an official BMW dealership it was likely they would offer both - but that if he didn't show some signs of taking the latter it was very likely they'd switch to describing the former as it - a known tactic.

Caveat Emptor, as they say.

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[ QUOTE ]

Caveat Emptor, as they say

[/ QUOTE ]

They certainly have better educated salesmen in your neck of the woods than in mine.

I guess the bottom line from this discussion is:

Check the maximum sum.

Make sure you are being offered insurance appropriate to your method of finance.

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Whilst your talking about BMW's I thought I'd jump in here.

BMW dealers are renowned for charging an excessive amount for their GAP Insurance.

I was speaking to one guy not too long ago who was quoted £1,100 for the GAP Insurance on his BMW M3 (don't recall the exact model as I'm not familiar with the range). However, by comparison, our equivalent policy was £269.

Is it any wonder that out of all our customers, more of them (12.46% actually) own BMW's than any other make of car. (the nearest vehicle make before that is VW at 10.20% followed by Audi at 7.08%

This is not meant to be an advertisement, but why do people insist on paying such fees when a quick search on the internet will reveal more than one company (of which we are one) selling the policy at a much more reasonable fee.

David confused.gif

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