As I have posted before, by English law, if the accident is not your fault at all, you can force the third party or his/her insurer to pay for repair of your car even though it may be above the cost of a replacement i.e. the so-called "write off" value.
I found it in an article written in LRM.
The problem with it is that the insurers don't want you knowing about it and will put up a fight. It takes quite a while inevitably and you may need to involve lawyers, but if the car is better than any you could buy with the write off value, i.e. you had it from a young age and looked after it, or you bought it a while ago and depreciation has bitten into its value, you can understand people wanting to go this route.
Mind you, with values of secondhand LRs going up the opposite may be true!
I'll attach a link to the article if I can find one.
