One of the unique aspects of my loss claim was that custom equipment permanently installed on the vehicle was covered by my insurance policy. I contacted the insurance company policy department and confirmed that the accessories I had installed, from the snub mount back to the 3.5″ exhaust were included in the coverage and that they were valued at replacement cost. This was one of the greatest sticking points when it came to my policy paying out since the policy terms said Actual Cash Value and the insurance company was really paying Market Value. The actual cash value of components I had installed on the car exceeded the market value of the car, even accounting for depreciation. I knew this was going to be an issue but fortunately I had just about every receipt I’d ever received for an aftermarket part dating back to the time that I had acquired the car in 2000. Of course the insurance company wanted to see these receipts as proof and so I faxed them 40 pages of individual invoices for the major components I had installed on the car.
After a couple of days I was notified that they would need to send an appraiser back out to inspect the car. I deduced that with the loss payout having increased with the addition of the aftermarket parts that they needed to reconsider if the car was going to be a total loss. I was well into the process of taking parts off the car so that I could get the motor out and this made the damage to the frame more apparent. The second appraiser came out and looked at the car and told me that even though the payout amount the insurance company would provide to me had gone up, so would the damage estimate, and the car would in all likelihood still be declared a total loss.
Better hurry up with that appraisal.
A day later I heard from the insurance company informing me that the car was still being declared a total loss and now the payout amount was $14,063 and the salvage buyback price was $1280. The person I spoke with said I would get actual cash value (their terminology for market value) for the aftermarket parts, not replacement cost, which contradicted what the policy specialist had told me. This would not be the last time that I found the policy side of the insurance company saying something that differed from what the claims side said.
I’ve been working on a new adapter so that I can flow test intake manifolds. My hope is to mess around some with porting the intake manifold and not hurt the performance of the part during the learning process. The new adapter is not quite finished, there’s a little bit of air leakage around the base that should be taken care of with a gasket.
Intake manifold flowbench adapter
I wanted to try and measure ‘something’ and just measuring the pressure loss through the entire manifold seemed like a boring test at this stage, especially since the leakage at the base would throw the results off slightly. While running some air through the manifold I thought that it felt as though the air pressure coming from the runner to cylinder 4 was weaker than the runners for cylinder 5 and 6 so I hooked up the velocity probe to measure the air velocity at the manifold runner outlet.
Velocity probe placed in manifold outlet
The velocity probe is a pitot-static system that will measure the pressure at the probe end and feed the pressures, static and dynamic, to the digital manometer so that the pressure can be recorded or the readings can be converted to an airspeed. The airspeed reading at the outlet for each runner are shown below.
More than likely if you are involved with a total loss claim there will be a CCC Market Valuation Report involved. CCC is the insurance business equivalent of Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax who determine consumer’s credit scores. Those three credit reporting agencies determine the credit score of consumers and then provide the information to lenders who then use the information to decide how to handle requests from their customers. One of the next things that I did was try and find out some more about this CCC Market Value Report, I came across this article about Total Loss Claims. (A local copy is here in case the original is removed.) Reading the article was like having somebody document what I was going through and filling in the pieces that were not evident to me. It made me aware of the substantial disadvantage that I was at in the negotiations with the insurance company.
I continued to research into CCC and found this News Station investigation into the company’s role in accident claims. Here’s a local copy of the video:
As I learned more and saw how my situation was fitting with what I had read about I became more determined to proceed carefully and give much attention to all of the information I was being presented with by the insurance company and CCC themselves. The more I dug, the worse the reality of the situation became.
