Quick question.

Does anyone know what are the consequences if you are involved in an accident when you are driving someone elses car (hence covered only 3rd party through insurance on your own policy), and the owner of the car you are driving has not declared modifications on the car?

 

Can't see it being an issue. There's nothing that you can have failed to declare to your insurer.

You are only insured 3rd party and therefore have no insurance liability towards the owner of the car you were driving and hence it is irrelevant what car you are driving or what modifications it has as long as it was road legal.

 

The wording is normally something like they will cover you for the declared car and "...any other car not owned by you or loaned to you under a hire purchase agreement..."

So there's nothing for you to declare in terms of the car you were driving the insurance company are cover the third party risk only (to be exact it is often only the minimum cover required by the Road Traffic Act...)

 

ANY OTHER VEHICAL etc etc.
Blanket 3rd party cover if driven with permission.

 

The issue as I see it is what if the owner of the car, who is also the policyholder has not declared any modifications to the car. Their own insurance would be worthless as any claim would be void due to the modifications. What if though a 3rd party was driving on their own full comp policy, they would have 3rd party cover only through their insurer. Would this be invalid if the cars insured policyholders cover was void.

Does that make sense ?

 

In this situation his insurance makes no difference... Your insurance company is covering the third party risk of you driving his car - the RTA does not require you to have fully comp...

If you crashed his car into a lamp post, for example, in this situation your insurance would cover the third party cost (i.e. replacement of lamp post etc.) he would be left to cover the cost of repairing his car (or recovering that cost from you).

His fully comp insurance is not relevant...

BTW, you need to check carefully that you are covered by your insurnace company to drive any other car third party. Many insurance companies are removing this clause from their policies.

 

I was under the impression that if you drive another car 3rd party, that other car still has to have valid insurance cover of it's own (but not specifically for you, and need be only the legal minimum).

If the other car's insurance is rendered invalid due to undeclared mods, that might cause problems.

 

true but pragmatically the worse that will happen is they will ask the owner to pay a premium to cover what the cost of the insurance WITH the mods.

I don't see it being an issue or even coming up unless one of the mods in question is a huge iron cow catcher on the front of the car or if the mods in question had a clear influence in the cause of the accident (e.g. tinted mirrored windscreens with the tint on the wrong side).

I'm basing this on when I crashed my Scorpio. The insurance company claimed I failed to notify them of a speeding conviction and charged me an additional premium to retrospectively cover what I should have been paying with 3 points for speeding.

In the end I had actually informed them, the call centre monkey only applied it to the premium for the S despite me clearly stating I had two insurance policies for two different cars and I got my money back.

The point is, technically my insurance was invalid as I had failed to declare a conviction (not true but they didn't know that at the time) Pragmatically though they covered my insurance claim and settled with the lorry I hit anyway.

YMMV