Be warned - you get what you pay for (Diamond Car Insurance)

Advantages: cheap especially for women, fine until you actually have to claim from them

Disadvantages: no two staff members ever give the same answer to your question, poor communication

I had been insured previously with Diamond and switched last year as elephant.co.uk gave me a better offer. This year my parents had offered to pay for my car insurance as I have gone back to studying full-time to do an Msc in speech therapy. I dutifuly searched many insurance companies to get the cheapest quote as i did not want my parents to have to pay any more than they had to. Diamond were the cheapest by about £100 so I took the insurance out with them.
Unfortunately just 1 month after taking out the insurance I had an accident and crashed into the back of another car as the winter sun blinded me for a second just as the car came to stop in front of me, as i came over the top of a hill.
I was very shaken up by the accident and my mum ended up phoning diamond for me and reporting the accident. They were very helpful on the phone and since the only damage was a broken headlight and a rather smashed in bonnet i thought things would be fixed in no-time especially since i live next door to the garage they recommended to do the repairs! The man from the garage came over to look at the car the very next day and said that as the car was 12 years old it is possible Diamond may try to write it off. He reckoned the car was worth between £800 and £1100 (it was a very much loved Renault Clio 1.8 RT - with only 41k on the clock in 12 years!) and that as it had been kept so clean and in such good condition he would take some photo's of the inside and of the milometer to try and persuade them it was worth fixing.

He then told me that although the bonnet was quite badly dented nothing on the inside was damaged and as the actual headlight bulb still worked it was still safe to drive until i got clearance to get it fixed. I didn't use it until i really had to and drove to the supermarket about 3 days later.
The next day I get a phone call from diamond to say sorry the cars been written off as a technical write off and uneconomical to repair, if you have any questions please call us. So i did call them - in fact the only reason i did call was to see why it was written off - what the quote for repairing it had been. All i can say is it is lucky i did phone them. I explained that i really wanted to push for getting the car fixed as it was worth alot more to me than any other car i could buy for £800 as i had kept it in such good condition and that it was still driveable as the man from the recommended garage had told me. She said well you can't drive it anyway we have cancelled your insurance from this morning and the salvage company have been called and will come and remove the car as soon as possible. I was astounded - had i not telephoned THEM i would not have found out i was uninsured - they might have deemed the car a write off but it was a technical write off and still driveable and they had not told me otherwise!! Equally i couldn't believe they had authorised the salvage company to come and take it away without informing me - all my personal belongings were still in the car and it would have been an incredible shock to just have someone turn up on the doorstep saying they had been authorized to take my car away. I had not even been given a chance to get any other quotes from other garages.
I was rather upset by their attitude and finally persuaded them to hold off the salvage company while i actually decided what to do and to get some more quotes. This involved me obviously driving to different garages to get other quotes - however diamond had uninsured me. It was a total struggle to get them to agree to insure me for another few hours while i took the car to garages.
The final straw came when 9 days after the accident i recieved a letter from them - dated 4 days after the accident telling me i was no longer insured by them as from the day after the accident. I therefore drove to the supermarket totally uninsured and no-one had told me this when i reported the claim. It had taken them 4 days to even write and tell me this and then i didn't recieve it for another 5 days. Had i not telephoned them myself i would have been driving around all week uninsured.
I think this is totally unacceptable. It is probably in the small print of their policy somewhere but who actually reads the whole thing when they take out a policy and after the accident i definately wasn't in the right frame of mind to scour the policy just in case they were going to do something like this.
To top it all off I was told that I lose the remaining £270 of my policy as i had on ly had the insurance for 1 month and they put that towards claiming back their costs for my claim, that and of course my £150 excess. So they make £420 out of me while giving me back the value of my car according to them - which so far 2months down the line has not been decided, somehow i doubt it will be near the £1k it is worth and will probably be under the £800 that was what the mechanic thought was the least i could expect.

Consequently i have just bought a new secondhand car (another clio!) with a rather large loan from the parental bank and had to find insurance for this car. Diamond had offered as a goodwill gesture (!!) to put some of the money i lost on my last policy towards a new one, therefore i got £200 off my policy. It turned out it was only £80 cheaper than a new policy with elephant but as i am a student i couldn't afford to pay an extra £80 just to ensure i wasn't with Diamond again (plus the fact that elephant are another subsidary of admiral just like diamond so may not be any better customer service wise). So i am trapped into another years insurance with diamond as they were the cheapest , i dread to think what will happen should i need to claim again so will just have to cross my fingers and not even think about it. As soon as i am working and can afford to change insurance companies i will!!

Well done if you have stuck with this review the whole way down, it has become somewhat of a rant and for that i apologise but i feel so angry at them for their attitude and customer service that it is quite hard to get the story down and warn other people without rambling a bit!!