eCar Insurance Review

Overall Rating

Beware of hidden excesses.
When they say no telephone service they really do mean it.
Even if you make a no-fault claim be prepared to be treated as if it was your fault, guilty til proven innocent and all that.
Expensive vs companies that provide much better service.
Amendments to your insurance cost a fortune, adding my partner to the insurance cost £100, changing cars to one which overall is much cheaper to insure actually ended up costing me £60!

When never having to deal with them everything seemed Ok, until we went to change cars. We tried to update the details of the car on the internet which failed miserably leaving the old car and the new car uninsured 250 miles away from home.
A month after getting the new car we were involved in a no-fault accident where by a young lad decided to pull out of a side road directly into the path of our car, leaving absolutely no time to think let alone act. We filed a no-fault claim. This is where it all goes dreadfully wrong. Firstly you get left feeling as if it was entirely your own fault when it clearly wasn't, you can never get hold of anyone because there is always someone else dealing with that bit (at last count 8 different companies were dealing with our claim, all of which knew nothing).
The car was left at the site of the accident for 2 weeks despite us calling daily to get the car collected from the side of the road! When the car finally got collected the crash repair team deemed it a write off (this was 15th Sept 2008, we today, 13th Oct 2008 received the valuation), by the 23rd of September they had already started proceedings to scrap the car (sent our tax disc off to the DVLA for refund that day as well) all this time we were trying to call them to find out what was going on, once again none of the companies had a clue what was going on.
Almost a month later we got a letter through the post which was supposed to have been received at the beginning of the claim requesting drivers documents to sign the car over to them. We were then told that because that letter had been processed it would slow the claim down while they waited for the documents requested! It was then that they realised that we wanted to keep the car despite us telling them numerous times before!
Bizarrely, despite being told the above, today (13th October) we received a final settlement e-mail stating the valuation of the car and to send them the documents so they could scrap the car! Obviously very annoyed at this email we decided to give them a call to see what the hell is going on.
They then went on to say that because we wanted to keep the car they would have to charge us a salvage fee of £100 and if we wanted to dispute it we had to prove the car was worth more than the offer they had sent us originally, the offer wasn ' t the problem, the silly salvage cost was considering the final settlement fee was only £275 itself.
Due to the settlement figure being so poor we decided to scrap the car anyway, however, we began to try and track the car down to get whoever was holding on to it to send us the tax disc, in order for us to get a refund. This is when we found out that the car had already been sent to a scrap yard and the tax been issued for a refund by the 8th company. So if we had wanted to go pick the car up today like we originally planned we would have not been able to do so. We ' ve gone on to file a formal complaint and would urge anyone who is considering taking insurance out with ecar to think again, the clear lack of direct telephone service is something to be weary of. They state on their website that any email enquiries will be dealt with swiftly but we waited 5 days for a response basically stating that they just take your money and have nothing to do with the actual claim, they cannot even be used as a contact for information relating to a claim.
It ' s stressful enough having to deal with an accident and being injured in an accident without having to fight with numerous companies providing shoddy service to actually get any simple task completed, and even then it ' s done badly.