An automotive case of who done it?
Well, it’s happened. My first car accident in fifteen years. Fortunately no one was seriously hurt and from a personal perspective, it wasn’t my fault. That is unless you are the police who attended the scene or the insurance company, who suggested that due to the time and effort involved investigating the incident, it would probably be best to call it 50 / 50!
I am not going to make this rant though. I can see from a practical point of view that it would be difficult, with out spending a lot of money and energy for what was a relatively minor shunt, to prove I wasn’t at fault. What irks me though is that for the next five years I will have to fill in my insurance forms stating that I have been involved in an incident and because it has been logged as a 50 / 50 I will see my premiums spiral!
To make matters worse, as I was doing deliveries for work, it had to happen in our newly acquired LDV Maxus, which I wrote about last week. You can imagine the stick I got when I returned to the office!
It all happened on a single track country lane in damp conditions on a blind bend. Without boring you with too many details as I approached the bend at about 15mph, rounding the corner was a Fiesta doing a fair lick of speed. As it is a single lane road I aim the van for the hedges, figuring that it will be a softer impact than the on coming car. Unfortunately, due to the lack of avoiding action from the other driver and the narrowness of the lane a van to car impact was inevitable, taking out the wheel and front suspension on the van and destroying the front of the Fiesta. Aside from some shock and whip lash injuries to the Fiesta driver there were no serious injuries, which in circumstances like this is the only thing that really matters.
As you can see, with out an admission of liability, any witnesses or evidence to the contrary the police and the insurance companies have nothing to go on. Fifty fifty it is then.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing that can be done about this particular accident but is there a solution to a problem like this in the future? Several insurance companies have proposed black box and GPS bases tracking systems that can be fitted to cars to log incidents like mine. Various pieces of information such as speed, steering angle and car condition (lights etc) would be logged and from that, an accident investigator could sift through the evidence to apportion blame. Indeed, some newer vehicles, such as the BMW M5 are already fitted with a logging system which stores critical information about the car, although this has been installed more for manufacturer purposes rather than incident recording.
In reality though, this all has a financial cost, one which we the insured will have to pay for. The other issue of course is public privacy and I personally don’t like the idea of being logged everywhere I go. It’s just too big brother for my liking, even if it does save my no claims bonus.
For now then, there’s only one thing I can do. Chalk it up to experience, thank my lucky stars that no one was hurt and put it down to a case of s*!t happens.