Your van is off the road. Nobody is paying you to wait.

8 October 2026

If you're a sole trader, the van is not a vehicle. It's the business. Every day it's off the road is a day you don't invoice, and nobody is paying you to sit at home waiting for a smash repairer to call back.

So when someone hits you, the first question is not "who pays for the panel". It's "how do I keep working this week".

The cost nobody puts on the quote

The repair quote tells you what the panel costs. It says nothing about the four days you couldn't take a job. For a trade, that second number is usually the bigger one, and it's the one that vanishes if you don't deal with it deliberately.

People handle it in one of three bad ways:

• keep driving the damaged van, hope nothing gets worse, and deal with it "after the busy period" that never ends
• claim on their own policy, pay the excess, and take whatever hire vehicle the policy allows — which for a lot of trade policies is a small sedan you can't fit a ladder in
• park it and lose the week

What you're actually entitled to

The person who damaged your van is responsible for the repair and for the fact you're without it. Legal Aid NSW describes the same principle:

If you believe that the other driver was 'at-fault', you may try to recover from them the cost of repairing your vehicle and other losses, such as hire car expenses.

"Other losses" is doing real work in that sentence. Being off the road is a loss. It's not goodwill, it's not a favour from your insurer — it's what the other side owes because of what they did.

Like for like matters

A replacement vehicle is only useful if you can do your job in it. A hatchback does not replace a one-tonne ute with a canopy. When we arrange a replacement, the point is to keep you working — the right kind of vehicle, for the whole repair, not for a capped number of days that runs out halfway through.

And you don't pay for it. It goes to the at-fault driver's insurer with the repair.

If your van is sitting damaged right now

Every day it sits is a day you've decided to absorb. That decision is worth ten minutes of checking first.

If someone else hit you, the repair and the time off the road may both be recoverable, and you may not need to touch your own policy at all.