Before The Flatbed.

#PersonalInsurance #Claims

This article was written by Tim Chadwick and published by News24 on 29 March 2026

 

This is a true story. It has been all over the media. Mr Pierre Coetsee suffered a misfortune, circa October 2025. His 2023 Defender incinerated itself. Comprehensively. His second misfortune, in the reported version, was his insurers response. The courts and especially the court of public opinion are a fickle thing, so you be judge and jury on this one. I have a view which tends to lean towards the grey areas, especially when it comes to insurance claim rejections.

 

Picture the scene. A forensic assessor, clipboard in hand, caterpillar boots on, cap not in hand, standing in front of a 2023 Land Rover Defender that has, since October 2025, been reduced to something a Joburg scrap dealer would lowball.

 

Two million Randelas of engineered British aspirational identity, now roughly the dimensions of a modest braai and zero utility. The assessor squints. Why did I get this one he muses, not flipping cut and dried. Not at all. More like fried. He consults his clipboard. He scribbles a heavy handed note, vaguely irritated. He then concludes that the fire appeared to originate from an internal mechanical or electrical defect. An impartial and imperfect man. He will be first to admit that. The game plan, a quick report, leave now and beat the traffic. He is smart and decisive. He is wired to deal in black and whites. Grey is not his favourite colour. Which is fine. For him.

 

I have a non-committal relationship with forensic science. We have been through a lot together and it has let me down before. I have questions. The car is ash. On the reported facts, what did they find that told them it was say, a defective component and not, say, a fuel line that chafed through on a bad Kalahari road? What, precisely, survived the fire with sufficient integrity to support any conclusion? My overarching question is about the standard of certainty required to deny a claim. From where I am standing, the standard appears to be we think, based on a forensic report, that it was electrical or a defective product.

 

Of course, there are two sides to this, as there are to most things one argues about. And then, there is the truth. It is the search for the last bit that gets me up in the morning. The mechanical and electrical exclusion is pretty stock standard and is not without logic. Insurers do not manufacture vehicles. They cannot carry the risk of every faulty component, every design defect, every penny saved in a production run in a factory they have never visited. That is the manufacturer’s exposure. Motor policies are not warranty policies. Fair enough. No rebuttal on that front.

 

But, there is a substantial but.

 

Fire sits at the very heart of what comprehensive motor cover in South Africa is meant to cover, however carefully the wording may seek to contain it. Has been so since Pa fell off the proverbial bus. What caused the fire may be a murky question. But what we do know is Johnny’s (aka Pierre) Defender was accidentally destroyed by fire. Accepted by all and sundry. Period. In this case, the forensic conclusion that an internal defect may have caused the fire rests on evidence the fire itself destroyed. The car is gone. Surely, the evidence is the burnt car? If it was say, a defective wire, exclude the wire and cover the fire damage. Hmmm, we are moving into the opaque domain of resultant damage and legal causation. This is where lawyers salivate and clients start Googling. Or ask Always Incorrect (AI).

 

On the reported facts, my view is this. Pay the poor man’s claim. Call it a gesture of goodwill. Say it is not an admission of liability, an ex gratia (out of grace) payment. Make a comprehensive decision. That is certainly what I would say, if I worked in the insurers PR department. I would then take the lift to the more polished end of the building. There I would politely ask to speak to the policy wording Shakespeare’s and ask them for the love of money and all that is good about insurance, to ensure that when they say comprehensive in page 231, sub section 23, paragraph 4(i), they mean comprehensive. I would then turn around and leave. Professionally and civilly.

 

If the insurer is so confident in their forensic conclusion about the cause, exercise subrogation rights and pursue Jaguar Land Rover directly. That is what subrogation is for. Subrogation is insurance semantics for times where the insurer has paid a claim and believes a third party bears responsibility for the loss, in this case Landrover. The insurer has access to legal teams, forensic experts and probably the fighting spirit for a prolonged commercial dispute, that poor Johnny, a private individual, simply does not have. Let the heavyweights fight the heavyweights. Johnny should not be part of that slugfest. He faithfully paid his comprehensive premium every month. He held up his end. Let you know who, hold up theirs.

 

Now, here’s Johnny.

 

He is softly humming, that’s me in the corner, that’s me holding a document explaining why the problem belongs to someone else, that’s me losing my car. Johnny eventually stopped humming and did the most logical thing. He returned the evidence to the people best placed to explain it. On a flatbed, nogal. No appointment necessary. Classic move. Bravo Johnny.

 

The National Financial Ombudsman (NFO) has been asked to rule. The NFO takes months. The outcome is not guaranteed. And while the process runs its course, Johnny has neither his car nor his insurance payout nor, one suspects, much enthusiasm for the phrase we will keep you updated.

 

This is where a proper risk advisor should have come in very handy. Not at renewal. Not when all is fine, the debit order runs and the vehicle sits in the driveway being comprehensively insured and completely untested. Before all of this drama.

 

Proper risk advice starts well before the fire. It starts with the right policy. The right advisor. High net worth individuals insuring high value vehicles should not be on the standard motor policy, that the call centre sold your neighbour for his weekend special runaround. They should be on a policy that has been specifically negotiated, specifically worded and specifically stress tested by a risk professional. A policy that explicitly states that resultant damage is covered, meaning that if an excluded event, like a defective component causes fire, the resultant fire damage, except the defective part, is covered regardless of what caused the fire. These policies exist. They are in fact the norm.

 

So, I say this to anyone in the insurance industry who has read this far, which I appreciate, since I know I can be long winded. The word comprehensive means something to the man on the street. Mr Joe Public. And allow me to play Joe. It must mean that accidental fire is covered. It must mean that when the bad things happen, like when his vehicle is destroyed through no fault of Joe, by an unforeseen event, the policy responds. If comprehensive no longer means that, we should stop calling it comprehensive, should we not? We should call it something more accurate. Something like selective? Or, perhaps, my personal favourite, good luck with the forensics. The marketing can sort out the exact phrasing. Before the kind of publicity one would normally decline.

 

Johnny paid his premiums. He did not set fire to his own Defender. This is not what he signed up for. Literally. He expected more than a forensic theory constructed from ash and a decline letter.

 

Somewhere in a beautiful corporate building, with high quality double espressos and a high concentration of legal talent, someone is comfortable with their definition of comprehensive. Somewhere on a forecourt in Nelspruit, a man returned a car on a flatbed as he ran out of road. Remarkably, both of those things are true at the same time. Make of that what you will.

 

To be paid or not to be paid is part of the question. The other part of the question is not who pays Johnny. It is how many Johnnys are currently waiting to find out what their policy means?

Before the flatbed.