insurance wrangle DRIVER James Pratley, who has declared war against motorists using mobile phones at the wheel, has another major motoring moan.

He is angry about insurance companies he claims short-change drivers after their cars are 'written off'.

Mr Pratley says he was almost killed when his Rover was hit by another car being driven by a man on a mobile phone.

Father-of-two Mr Pratley, of Queen Emma's Dyke, Witney, who has worked for Rover's Cowley works for the past 26 years, says he is lucky to be alive after surviving the crash in which his Rover 820Si Fastback was hit by a car as he was leaving the Cowley factory at 6am on February 20 this year.

Mr Pratley then found himself in a wrangle with his insurance company, which said it could not replace his written-off car after the accident.

He bought the P-reg car - valued at £21,200 in Glass's guide - nine months before the accident and it was fully comprehensively insured.

After the accident, in which he suffered bruising and whiplash injuries, he expected it would be automatically replaced.

But his company, Hastings Direct, of Bexhill-on-Sea, Hastings, said it could not replace the car because its specification had changed. Instead, it offered £12,800, a sum which Mr Pratley was forced to accept. After Mr Pratley had paid off the finance loan he used to buy the car, he was left with nothing.

He said: "I urge everyone to read the small print on their insurance forms. This was the first new car I had ever bought and I had only owned it for nine months.

"Everyone assumed I'd get a new car, but the insurance company said that because they couldn't match the specification, they couldn't replace it."

He said Rover had upgraded the specification by adding air-conditioning and a better sound system. "That upgrade cost me thousands of pounds," he added.

The AA said this week that it felt Hastings Direct was being "picky".

A spokesman said: "They are not doing anything wrong, but normally insurance companies replace written-off new vehicles with the nearest equivalent model.

"Hastings are not being very pragmatic and it's not very spirited of them. It's narrow-minded to take this attitude and they should cover cars as new for the first 12 months."

A spokesman for Hastings Direct said that Mr Pratley's specific model had undergone a substantial upgrade between the time he bought it and the time of the accident, and thus the cost of the new car was substantially more than the original.

This meant they were unable to replace it 'like for like'.

"Our policy is quite specific on this point. For total loss, we agree to replace a car of the same make, model and specification," said a spokesman. "The specification had since changed and we - and our other policy-holders - would have lost out if we had replaced Mr Pratley's car with the newer, more expensive model.

"The cost of upgrading his car and putting him in a better position than he was before the accident, would have fallen on our other policy-holders."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.