Re: Car Advice

Best bet would be to pay for a decent motor engineer to do an independent examination of it so if it highlights any fault you can then show it to Nissan. If you take it to Nissan and they examine it and find a fault then my guess would be they would just quietly fix the fault so they couldn't be held responsible.

The difficulty is if condition were that bad the handbrake mechanism may have become impeded with snow and ice, you set the handbrake and believe it to be engaged but because its frozen it isn't fully engaged and it slides down the hill. Then when you take it to the mechanic the ice will have melted out of the mechanism and it will work normally so he wouldn't be able to find a fault. My old VW Golf used to be like this - only in my case it would freeze 'on' rather than 'off'.

Failing that if you have full no claims and protected no claims then just hand it over to your insurance to sort out. The increase to your premium is likely to be small for a comparatively minor claim like that.