Stolen catalytic converter and insurance, what to do and how to open a claim.

what the hell [Music] damn it what hey guys colby coming to you from muffler tech priuscats.com and stolencats.com today's video is going to address stolen catalytic converters and how to properly start an insurance claim so just a quick preview of some of the cars that are in this morning for stolen cats and priuses are still coming in strong we're seeing lots of accords seeing elements what we don't have this morning are some of the fords that come in with stolen cats but this is less about what type of vehicles they are uh targeting at the moment and more about how to handle an insurance claim to make sure that you get the best service and your vehicle gets fixed properly okay so your catalytic converter has been stolen you have full coverage or at least comprehensive coverage on your insurance policy you are interested in opening a claim and setting up a shop to fix your vehicle so you don't have to pay completely out of pocket to fix your car and what i want to go over is some key points of what's involved in an insurance claim and what you should be doing to make sure that you get the best service uh you get targets fixed properly you end up with the correct parts and also not allowing your insurance to manipulate the situation so let's go over uh over my list first of all number one you legally can choose the shop you want to repair it at least in california now i recognize our audience is growing and if you're watching this in a different state i believe this applies to every everywhere in the us but go ahead and check your local laws to make sure that what i'm telling you is factual but in california you can choose your own shop your insurance company will likely try to recommend a shop or even insinuate that you need to go to the shop in which they're telling you to get an estimate this is not true insurance companies do this because they have something called a drp with mostly body shops drp stands for direct prepare program and the reason that insurance companies have drps is because they have negotiated a contract with the given shop uh they have multiple shops of course but um they have negotiated a contract with with their drp shops um so that they can control the labor rate they can control what sort of parts are used and essentially make the repair cost less to them this is not necessarily advantageous for the insured because you may end up at a shop that first off maybe isn't the best for fixing a stolen catalytic converter body shops often don't have exhaust programs or any sort of knowledge around welding or fabrication as far as replacing catalytic converters so they will often sublet to other shops and you as the consumer have no control over what shop is ultimately going to work on your car so again number one you choose your own shop okay number two uh is basically a continuation of number one and uh that is when you're getting ready to make an insurance claim uh my recommendation is to choose the shop that you want to do the repair before you even call your insurance company this allows you to uh to have things kind of prepared uh when you're talking to your insurance agent on the phone you can tell them that hey i need to open a claim for a stolen catalytic converter i've already chosen my shop of choice to do the repair this kind of squashes their normal kind of canned response of well you should take it here or this is the shop we recommend and i've heard some stories around the insurance agents go well you need to go to this shop um you have the right to have your vehicle go to wherever you want to have it fixed obviously i'd like that to be muffler tech here in sacramento again i recognize that we may not be very convenient to get to depending on where you're watching this in the country but do your diligence do your research figure out who you want to do the repair again before calling the insurance company and when you're doing your research my recommendation is you can do the old school ask around get some opinions from friends um but uh recently in the last 10 years or so we as consumers have all been able to lean on online reviews and i am a firm believer in online reviews uh especially ones that uh are vetted and uh companies that use algorithms uh the first that comes to mind is yelp yelp is very good about taking down reviews that are not accurate and or may may have been put up by friends of the shop or or business that you're doing research on i can tell you from experience uh with muffler tech had over 300 five-star reviews on yelp that is a very difficult thing to get to uh as the owner of of this establishment i work incredibly hard to keep that five-star status and it is not something that you can fake with yelp anyway uh google reviews obviously are also a another very good source um but choose your shop wisely you want to make sure who is doing the repair is educated on what parts need to be used in the replacement that the replacement itself and the fabrication and welding and the installation is done properly um catalytic converter installation is is something that uh people tend to kind of uh think about as as being not a big deal i don't want to be overly dramatic about it but a converter needs to be installed and welded in 100 um the right way if not you get little tiny leaks in the welds you can you can run two lean codes in the system uh you can have smog failure uh you can ultimately have cat failure if it's installed improperly so really really important that you find a good shop to uh to install and again do that research before calling your insurance company so you know exactly where you want the vehicle to uh to end up okay number three uh you've got a vehicle that's missing a converter um you have insurance insurance will pay to get that vehicle transported to whatever shop you've chosen to do the repair um when you're making your claim one of the things that you may ask the agent when you're on the phone is would uh you prefer that my shop of choice arranges the toe or do you guys have a tow service you uh you would like to use to to arrange pickup and transport to the to the chosen shop companies like aaa i know have roadside service so they will often have you use their tow service again they're controlling their costs nothing wrong with that the one thing to know about the tow to the shop is often when it's organized by the insurance company uh it is a back burner type situation in other words uh the contracted tow company that is towing your vehicle for the insurance company knows this is you know a vehicle sitting in your driveway that's disabled uh it generally gets pushed to the back of the list depending on what they have going the tow company has going for that particular day obviously somebody that's got a broken down car on the freeway is going to take precedence over your car that's safely in your driveway so if you want the tow to the shop to happen efficiently then i suggest having the shop of choice arrange a tow not all shops have tow companies they work with but the good ones that are used to dealing with insurance claims certainly good ones that are used to dealing with stolen catalytic converter claims should have a tow company kind of on the shelf that they would use that will probably get you much faster tow service like for instance we have a couple of companies we work with when a customer calls us say hey we have a stolen cat uh it's an insurance claim we usually we'll arrange the toe uh we put uh our tow guy in touch with with the customer and the tow guy arranges and uh the the tow time and pickup and it's generally more convenient for you as the customer so your choice on that know that the toe no matter what no matter what it costs within whatever the the the contract says in your insurance agreement speaking to how many miles away the shop is and things like that the tow will be covered by the claim this is not going to be something you're going to have to pay out of pocket okay number four let's talk about the type of claim that this is going to be this is a stolen catalytic converter claim uh this falls under your comprehensive coverage now what's really important to know about comprehensive and a comprehensive claim is again at least in the state of california i can't speak to the entire u.s although i'm fairly certain this applies everywhere comprehensive claims will not raise your premiums now i'm careful about that statement because uh i i'm i'm not a lawyer i i don't uh i don't have the ability to um talk to to you about every single contract that's written but i can tell you that major companies uh in automotive insurance comprehensive claims will not affect your uh annual premium so why does this matter uh so many people are so concerned about making insurance claims because they don't want their premiums to go up or they're worried about having a bad mark on their on their policy or whatever it is don't do that this is why you pay insurance this is why you have a monthly or biannual or annual bill uh to protect your your belongings and protect your fiscal impact if somebody takes your catalytic converter now really quickly um comprehensive is considered a a non-at fault claim uh it doesn't just cover catalytic converters uh it would cover somebody steals your spare tire tailgate on your truck somebody breaks your window steals your laptop driving on the road rock hits your windshield breaks it these are all comprehensive claims um so uh just keep that in mind for future reference there's no reason to uh to to not make a comprehensive claim let's talk about deductibles um every policy has what's called a deductible even if you have a zero dollar deductible it's still called a deductible um essentially um most can policies are written with a 500 deductible uh again you would have to look at your policy and your contract to know what yours is a good policy is going to have a much lower deductible on comprehensive than on collision or liability but most do not so so one of the things i would encourage my audience to do is check your policy if you don't know find out what your comprehensive deductible is and uh call your company and find out how much it would cost you on an annual uh premium basis to reduce that uh give you an idea we have a policy here at the shop we have two prius two toyota prius shop vehicles and when we added those to the policy and and really what we've learned about insurance and handling so many stolen catalytic converter claims uh i called our our insurance company and took our comprehensive not a collision our liability just are comprehensive um for 500 dollars of deductible 250 and uh my premium only went up like six dollars a month so um it's incredibly inexpensive um to do so uh again i recommend um checking what your comprehensive is if you're in the middle of a stolen catalytic converter claim now you won't be able to reduce it and pay the lower deductible on this claim but for future claims [Music] you you will have a lower deductible so something you should do is shop deductibles now let's talk about once the vehicle is fixed uh the deductible will be paid to the shop that's doing the repair uh some people are confused about how that works um if you've got a 3 000 repair bill for instance the insurance company approves the 3 000 repair when you go to pick that up at the given shop that shop is going to charge you the customer or the 500 and then it's up to that shop it's excuse me it's the shop's responsibility to then get the uh the remaining bill paid by the insurance company to them again good shops shops that understand how to work with insurance companies will not make you wait for them to get paid by the insurance company the way that we work is once we have approval from the given insurance company to repair the vehicle we get electronic proof of payment through the form of an email or some something similar to that once we know payment is coming we go ahead and fix the car collect the deductible from the customer and put the customer back in their vehicle even though we may be waiting on a check for a week or two uh that's what we do and and uh what what most shops that understand how to handle an insurance claim do um you will run into some shops that um will tell you that you can't pick up the car until they're paid in full uh of course they're just protecting themselves i understand that but that also means that that shop's not used to dealing with insurance companies and may not have the financial wherewithal to wait for that check so maybe not the best shot to choose if that's the case and i would suggest before choosing the shop that's doing the repair to check and make sure that you'll be able to get your car back before they actually receive payment from the insurance company okay so number six this is the last one i think it's one of the most important things to know about an insurance claim around a stolen catalytic converter and that is total loss lots of people are confused about what total loss means at least in reference to a catalytic converter being stolen essentially insurance companies uh when they evaluate any claim around damage to a vehicle theft to a vehicle they do evaluation of the vehicle itself so in simple numbers i'm going to say let's say we have a vehicle that's experienced the catalytic converter theft that's worth ten thousand dollars and let's say the replacement converter costs 8 200 to fix it now again i'm pulling these numbers out of the air and i'm doing it for simple math i i can't honestly say i've ever had a vehicle cost 8 200 to fix speaking to a stolen catalytic converter outside of a couple of uh newer diesel pickups but the point is for ease of math we've got a vehicle that the insurance company says is worth ten thousand dollars we've got an 8200 repair bill now that vehicle likely is going to be a total loss customers are confused about this it's easy uh and normal for people to understand car accidents and damage to vehicles from being crashed because you look at the vehicle and you go wow that thing hit a tree going 80 miles an hour like it's it's destroyed uh and the cost to fix it is going to be more than what the vehicle is actually worth that visually is something that's very easy to understand and happens pretty frequently so everybody understands that with stolen catalytic converters you look at a vehicle wow this thing looks perfect there's nothing wrong with it other than when we started it's super loud because it's missing an exhaust component the end of the day the insurance company doesn't care what happened to the vehicle what the insurance company cares about is this is how much the vehicle is worth and this is how much it's going to cost to repair it most insurance companies work on what's called an 80 threshold what does that mean that means a ten thousand dollar vehicle if it has eighty one hundred dollars eighty two hundred dollars worth of damage that's over eighty percent of what the vehicle is worth and commonly the insurance company will declare that a total loss some insurance companies work at a 60 to 65 percent threshold so it's really important to understand uh what your insurance company is doing around its its valuation and what threshold they're working with it's also really important again to choose a shop that understands how to manipulate this if you don't want the vehicle to become a total loss we are getting lots of honda accords that are that are rated s u lev you can see my other video i'm not going to go into a bunch of detail about that if you want to look i'll put it in the description a link to it to the the honda accord stolen catalytic converter problem most of them are coming in that are su lev vehicles that require factory parts it's a head pipe a catalytic converter two sensors some bolts and gaskets and it runs about 35 to 3800 to fix these cars honda cords are excellent vehicles uh they are able to stack miles on them and most of them have over 200 000 miles on them well if you take an 0.506 honda accord with 250 000 miles on it its book value isn't very high uh in most cases the book value is under the uh the repair cost of 35 to 3800 what happens now that vehicle becomes a total loss completely unfair to the customer they had a perfectly good working car was parked in their driveway somebody stole their catalytic converters nothing else wrong with the car but the repair is so expensive that the insurance company declares the the vehicle total loss if you don't want the vehicle to become a total loss make sure you end up at a shop that understands how to manipulate the the insurance the insurance claim uh and manipulate the estimate so that that vehicle can be saved and there is ways to do that these are things that you should be doing around asking questions in your interview ultimately with what shop you choose to have do your repair so that's pretty much what we're going to end with today what i want to make sure everybody understands is if if you're near our shop of course we have a tremendous amount of experience with insurance claims and replacing catalytic converters we'd love to be your shop of choice around the repair uh if not as mentioned uh quite a few times now wherever you are in the country take your time research make sure the shop that you're sending it to is is going to uh going to help you the customer and one more time then don't let the insurance company tell you where to go that is 100 your choice hey guys thanks for watching if you found this informative please share this video subscribe we're trying to build an audience we're trying to help people with this catalytic converter epidemic uh and um we'd love to uh to hear from you if you have any questions um have a great day

Channel: Muffler Tech

Views: 23,840

Keywords: stolen cat, stolen catalytic converter, insurance claim, prius, honda, accord, nissan, muffler tech

Id: fkicHWm4zf0

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020