They are providing me a rental car until mine is fixed. A Hyundai Sonata, which is a very pleasant car with a lot of nice features, but also has a few 'fatal' flaws. I could not live with it. Also, I have no pics. It's already at the body shop.

 

Diminished value is often not paid for a 1st party claim (ie. you make the claim to your own insurance carrier) but may be paid when making a 3rd party claim (ie you make a claim against the other driver's insurance carrier). I speak with some authority as I had $18k of rear end damage done to a virtually new (3 month old) car a few years ago by are careless teenage driver. Her insurance carrier told me 'no' the first 2 times I brought it up, but when I played my card and told them I was an attorney and that it wouldnt take me any time at all to file a suit against them, they agreed to compromise with me. I asked for $4k and got $2500 from them for the diminished value. At the time the car was worth about $40k and I pitched for a 10% decrease in value despite the repairs. As proof I took it to a dealer that agreed the repairs were done extremely well but said they'd still have to take $2k off on a trade because the electronic paint tester (all dealers have one of these - it shows the paint thickness in thousands of an inch) would show that it was repaired. Now I live in CT and there is some legal authority for 3rd party diminished value recovery here. The leading case law is from a 50 year old case. Each state's law may be different. I believe there are only 2 states which have passed legislation permitting 1st party recovery of diminished value. And as for a repaired car being "as good as new" --- I say B.S. No paint finish is ever as good as done in the factory. My car was repaired by a very good shop that does the repairwork for high end car dealers in the area (including Ferarri and Mercedes) and the sheet metal welded in was done perfectly. All seams and gaps lined up. Still, the paint finish was a 3 stage paint and the repaint just wouldnt match so they ended up having to spray the entire car. I could see the color difference in the door jambs every time I got into the car. And when small rocks did bounce up from the road and chip at the paint, the chips from the respray areas always broke away in large pieces leaving much worse blemishes than the tiny pitting that the factory finish would have endured from the same events. Eventually after 3 years I got rid of the car because I just couldnt bear it any more. The car's appearance was just never the same after the accident.

 

Oh, and as for Carfax, its not a very reliable service. My $18k of damage never showed up on the Carfax report. When I traded in the car, the dealer printed a report and was I ever shocked that it showed the car was never in an accident or repaired. Surprisingly the dealer seemed to take a heck of a lot of stock in the report as he barely looked over my car and never noticed the repaint, despite the fact that the tape line edge (from when it was sprayed) could be felt along each door jamb. The car was clean and recently waxed when I traded it so it looked good from 3 ft away.

 

I never felt Carfax was that reliable. I look the car over personally with a fine tooth comb when buying *pre-owned* vehicles.