£900 to mend Clio sunroof?

I'm not sure if anyone can help, but my mum has just been told that it's going to cost her £900 to mend the sunroof on her 2002 Clio Initiale. It got jammed somehow when she opened it the other day, and apparently the mechanism is broken on one side and now the whole thing will need to be replaced.

She really deosn't have this kind of money, but has also checked with an independent garage who has agreed with the price. Does anyone know of a cheaper way around this? She would even settle for having the sunroof made unusable - but apparently this isn't possible either. At the moment it is jammed slightly open, so she needs to find a solution quite quickly.

Thanks!

Macleash

someone tried to break into it, didn't they? claim on the insurance

Hehe I like the cut of your jib :)

...which is obviously frequently read by the insurance industry...

;-)

Chris

Erm that would actually be Fraud, and a bit silly having posted the evidence on this newsgroup!

Tony

There is the risk though. And fraud normally attracts a stay chez ElizabethII...

Tony

Yes, I guess so. Might be worth the risk against spending 900UKP on a 5-year old Clio?

Chris

If you have fully comp insurance you can try claiming on it, FC gives you accidental damage so you could say you accidently damaged the sunroof and it needs to be fixed, of course you will have to pay the excess etc but I see no reason why you can't claim.

Hi - yes in the meantime she has phoned the insurance company and they will fix it for =A3220 excess under accidental damage - so that's looking much better!

Thanks for the advice though - she's definitely not the fraudulent type so it's lucky she's covered!

macleash ( snipped-for-privacy@googlemail.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

At a guess they need to drop the headlining to get at things, so it's a big job.

Of course, on a MK2 Golf, there's no need to because the designers were sane ;).

And possibly worse. On my Merc estate, the sunroof motor is inside the rear wing, so the actuating cable runs all the way down to that. When I broke a similar car and sold the motor I ended up cutting the cable because there was no way to remove it without stripping the entire interior. I'm guessing the Clio uses a similarly half-baked idea.

Jesus. I won't buy something I can't service myself. Even if I don't actually service it myself, it saves in labour when you have to pay someone else to fix it...

A sheet of this:

I feel the same. Which is one reason I'm seriously considering getting shut of the Merc - certain things are main-dealer only. Like the SRS light has been lit since I bought the car. There's no fault, only that someone disconnected a wire while repairing something, and it can only be reset by the main dealer computer.

Plus my local dealer (I guess others may be the same) has no such grubby thing as a "parts department" - when I need something as simple as hydaulic oil (and on these you use non-OEM at your peril!) I have to sit around on leather sofas on the showroom while a nice man in a suit fetches it from the parts shop. And charges me accordingly.

This is a 14-year-old car, FFS. It's too good to be scrapped, but dealer servicing now costs as much as the car is worth. Another symptom of the throwaway society.

Yeah, cos all number plates and VINs are automatically associated with an IP address!

Bob

Or £220 + one strike in the "no claims protection" + no increase in premium because of the type of claim.

..and IPs are linked directly to the person at the keyboard at the time!

What a lovely world you must live in. It's a claim, it'll go on your insurance record, your future premiums will be affected.

John

Not really - it's insurance.

Yes.

Yes.

Maybe.

In this case the claim isn't caused by bad driving nor theft, but by accidental damage. It's a relatively small claim and is non-fault*. Depending on the circumstances of the driver and vehicle, some underwriters will ignore this claim for loading the premium. It may influence the no claims, it may not - that'll again depend is no claims protection has been switched on.

It's entirely possible that this claim will make jack all difference to the premium.