[Cobstar]

Sorry to hear about your car being damaged.

As others have said advise your insurance company for information but saying you are claiming through the dealer. This gives you fallback should the dealer not resolve the problem to your satisfaction.

Ask the dealer to pay for an independent inspection to confirm all the issues have been identified and repair is the best option.

If you agree on repair do not accept the car until you are happy with it. A good bodyshop will be able to match the paint - we had metallic paint on a 4x4 repaired and you wouldn't have known the repair was there.

Unfortunately the same 4x4 was written off recently - the SO's car - so we know too much about insurance companies. The car sustained significant frontal damage but the the air bags did not deploy and the passenger cell kept us safe.

We used our preferred manufacturer approved bodyshop. They were concerned about future problems relating to an issue with the gearbox (wouldn't select gear initially when they took it into workshop) that might cause problems in future but insurance company would refuse to cover them. The independent assessor for the insurance company had same concerns about that and also the rear suspension. We reluctantly agreed write-off given the risks of the car being repaired and then underlying problems occurring which we would be liable for.

Sad the Shogun has gone as we'd had her from 3 months old and she'd only done 32k in five years. They're like hen's teeth so her replacement is a 2011 BMW X3 with rather more miles on the clock.