Originally Posted by
disco2hse
Ahh well you see, that's the game. Insurance covers you for specific incidents, and so if you can say that road conditions on day x were such that they caused damage to my car then you may be covered. However if you say I traveled course y for six months and on month seven my car broke, then you are not likely to be covered.
The more specific, the better. It helps if you have a photo of the pot-hole you can say contributed to the damage, for example. What you also need to be able to say is that there had been no previous similar occurrences of damage to the same part/place on the car, otherwise they may ping you for wear and tear or faulty workmanship on previous work done.
They will also ping you for design faults, saying such things are between you and the manufacturer. So a weak chassis member, that is frequently known to fail, may be put into the civil suits file (and will not be processed as a claim) but a chassis that breaks while a vehicle that was performing its designed purpose on a road that was not up to the required level of standard for roading is more likely to go through.
Successive damages also need to be linked to the contributing incident. So the TC damage was caused by the original damage but it looks bad if you say my chassis broke and I drove another 2000 km then the TC case broke too. They will laugh loudly as they aim for the bin. However if you can demonstrate that you undertook to make remedial repairs in order to get the vehicle to a proper place of repair but in doing so the TC also broke, then it is more likely to be covered. That part comes under all reasonable actions that ought to be taken by a reasonable person. It would be unreasonable to expect A grade repairs in the middle of the Simpson and it would be just as unreasonable to expect someone in the middle of Sydney to wait a week before getting such repairs done when in both cases the result was going to be a trashed TC.