Our little Toyota Corolla was recently hit while parked on the street. The person who hit it felt very bad and quickly called his insurance and got everything moving quickly to get this resolved. There was no one in the car and the damage was limited to the front driver’s side corner. I figured this was pretty basic and would get fixed with minimal hassle.
Yeah, so much for being an optimist.
The person who hit us has MetLife Auto Insurance and lived outside the state of Utah. To keep things streamlined we agreed to go to a repair shop that MetLife recommended. They had an Enterprise rent-a-car around the corner and indicated they’d paid for a like model rental car. Turns out that wasn’t really true.
While picking up the rental car I was told that the state of Utah allows insurance companies to not pay for some of the rental car fees, namely insurance. So now the rental car was costing me $20+ in insurance a day. A few days later MetLife indicated that Utah state law allowed them to only pay $20/day towards a rental car no matter what kind of car you have. This means a MetLife customer could hit your 7 passenger van and was only required to contribute $20/day towards renting a replacement van. The $20/day doesn’t even cover the comparable Corolla model rental that I’m driving. So now I’m paying even more per day to cover this thing.
The bottom line I got from the MetLife rep was that they were only going to do the absolute minimum required by Utah state law. Doesn’t matter that their client was 100% at fault by hitting our parked car on the street. So far the only good thing is that they seem to be covering all of the repair costs on the Corolla. Though they’ve proven to be such a pain in other areas I won’t be surprised if we get a call from them indicating that they mis-spoke and want us to pay 1/2 of the repair costs.
This whole thing makes me mad at MetLife Auto Insurance for jerking us around. I’m also going to start looking into the Utah laws in this area, there’s no reason why the law should allow auto insurance companies to skip out on some of the costs for covering my expenses while my car is being repaired. That seems to go against the very concept of insurance in the first place.