Tell us about your worst accident experience

I made a wrong turn at night & was on a different road than I thought I was on. I ended up going off a corner & rolled my 77 Granada 5 times end over end. I was able to walk away. I wasn't wearing a seatbelt.

 

Luckily, with 47 years driving, and 63 years riding experience, I have nothing to report.

 

You really shouldn't think this way. I might have misunderstood, but from what I can see, the S-class accident happened recently, and when you were still a minor. So I'm guessing you're still extremely young. I would hope you are much better than you were when you rolled your Prius, but you shouldn't think of yourself as being so much better - that sort of overconfidence will cause you to crash again. So try to stay cautious.

Yes, people do make that assumption.

I grew up in a town with a lot of retired people - the average age was 67. My parents still live there, are both in their late 60s now, and there are still a lot of pubs and stuff where they don't fit in because they're far too young.

When I was 17, I was driving home from work - I had a job in a supermarket. I'd used that money to buy my first car - a ten-year-old Peugeot 305. I was going along a fairly narrow two-lane road, and someone pulled out from a petrol station without looking, right in front of me. It was raining, and I knew I couldn't stop in time to avoid him. There was a bus coming the other way, so I couldn't swerve to avoid him. So I had to hit him. I looked at the situation, and realised that if I went straight on, I'd take out his right wing and all four of my left panels. But if I turned left, I'd damage my front bumper and right wing, and take out all four of his right panels. So I turned left.

He was 80, and, like your lady, wasn't wearing his prescription glasses. But that didn't mean he didn't initially get out and try to blame me because I was a teenager.

What amazed me was when a very old lady came across the road on her walking frame and said she'd be happy to be a witness to say that the accident was the old guy's fault. That made him change his tune fairly quickly.

He begged me to get a quote for repairs and let him pay cash. I agreed, and took full advantage of the discrepancy between the quote and what I actually paid, but in hindsight I regret this. The reason he wanted to pay cash was that this would have been his fourth at-fault claim that year. And it was Easter. I should have forced him to go through insurance, just to get him off the road.

 

Back when I was in college- I T-Boned a guy who ran a red light as he illegally crossed a 4-lane divided highway!
This was 1980- so there were no sobriety checks back then- but as I approached the other driver I saw him swaying and he smelled like a brewery. I mentioned it to the cop as soon as he arrived on scene- the guy was cuffed and arrested on the spot.

His insurance co (Liberty Mutual) used every trick in the book to dupe a 19 yo (me) out of any money they could and told me it was 25% my fault "because I was there". They also told me they were going out of business and if I didn't settle for the 75% value of my car that there was a good chance I would never get a cent from them later on. Remember this was pre-internet 1980- it was not easy to pull up info on this kind of stuff. So I took the reduced money and that was it.

Lo and behold- 9 months later I get served with a court date- (arrested/convicted) drunk guy was suing me (with a free legal aid attorney) for the loss of his car! Luckily my insurance co provided a lawyer and the judge threw out the case the second the arrest/conviction record was presented to him.
Boy- did that open my young eyes as to what kind of scumbags are out there!

 

Yap, there is a reason Liberty Mutual is the #10 worst insurance in USA.

Once we had the "you're in good hands" insurance. When my wife had non-at fault accident with an uninsured driver (that resulted in totaling her car), the agent would call her several times a day to pressure he to admit her own fault. It amounted to psychological torture. She resisted and we had a witness who came forward to defend. Couple of years after, that "you're in good hands" company dropped our homeowner insurance (we never had a claim). I googled and it turned out "you're in good hands" insurance is the #1 on the list of worst insurance in USA.

The worst part is, the unethical behavior of those companies gives them better profit margins and they are growing rapidly at the expense of the ethical ones.

 

True, I had 4 accidents (2 at my fault, only 1 major one) before I learned how to drive carefully enough. That was learning to drive cars with manual tranny and in extreme weather conditions.

So far, my daughter had 2 accidents (fairly minor, non-at fault) and she seems OK, but that is learning in automatic cars and mild weather.

My son just started driving, no accidents yet, I'm very very worried, despite doing simulator driving first and then driver's ed at his school.

 

I'm pleased to hear it.

I love driving fast on a track too. I don't get to do it often enough, but it's great fun.

 

By "out there", I assume you mean "in insurance company offices".

A few years ago, our house was burgled. HSBC insurance tried every possible trick not to pay. I think this is the best of many examples.

• A ring was stolen. It was an heirloom passed to my wife. It was originally bought by her great-great grandmother in Glasgow in the 1870s. Her great-great grandmother moved to Australia. At the time of the burglary, we lived in Hong Kong, and the ring was 135 years old. We had photos of it, and we had an Australian valuation from ten years earlier. HSBC refused to pay out because we didn't have the original Scottish 1870s receipt.

Insurance companies came in for a lot of criticism in Australia after the Queensland floods a couple of years ago. A lot of people had home insurance that specifically covered them for flooding. After the flood, they discovered that their policy small print referred them to a website with several thousand words of small print. Buried towards the end of that small print was a clause that said the insurance was valid only for flooding caused by rain coming in to the house from above, and not for flooding caused by water rising from flooded rivers. The insurance companies only started to pay out once the government started threatening sanctions against them.

 

Yes. The insurance companies' business model appears to be: "We take money from you every month. We give you nothing in return." Which is certainly profitable.

Anyway, back to terrible accidents and the horrors of youth.

I haven't had much myself, and the accidents I've had have been pretty minor.

One must have been 18 months ago now: I was taking the kids to Canberra for the weekend. We'd driven the 300+km to Canberra without incident, and we were at traffic lights on the big main road that runs through the city. There were five or six cars in front of me, and I had been stopped for a good 10-15 seconds. There was another car behind me. I heard another car smash into the back of the car behind me; as that one ran into me, I turned right to minimise the whiplash on me and the kids, and on the people in the car in front of me.

There were four cars all squished together, but no-one was seriously injured. We got out easily enough. The repair bill for my Prius was about A$ 12,000. The woman who caused it wrote her car off (it was a new Ford Falcon). The car behind me was written off too.

The woman who caused it was working for a charity. She was taking two downs-syndrome kids - one her adopted son, and the other a friend of his, both around 11 or 12, and both with quite severe conditions - to a special event in Canberra, and one of them had suddenly s--t himself and screamed; this distracted her, and that was why she didn't notice the stopped traffic. Obviously the crash was her fault, and everything came out of her insurance (and they paid up without argument). But I did sympathise with her: something like that would distract anyone - I'd have struggled to pay attention too. I looked after her car while she took the kid off to a nearby service station to clean him up. The poor woman now had to deal with two very-scared downs-syndrome kids, one of whom was covered in poo, with no car, 100km from home. I did all I could to help.

One of the interesting things was when the fire brigade came to pull the cars apart. They asked me to go back to my car and check it was switched off: twice in the previous month, they'd dealt with similar crashes involving Priuses, and because they don't make any noise, they'd wrongly assumed that they were switched off. Each time, when the cars were pulled apart, the Prius started up and drove off by itself, and firemen had to run after it to try to stop it.

 

Thankfully- even though my car (1976 Fiat X-19) sustained major damage- no one was injured. Cars back then had real bumpers. The other guy's car was some sort of galactic cruiser size Chrysler- so he wasn't injured either.

 

I meant insurance companies and drivers (can be scumbags)!

 

Oooh. That was a very cool car to have.

 

My biggest accident was buying a 1989 Isuzu Trooper.

 

its been a rough 6 years. but in the last 15 I have had had no "at fault" accidents

my worst accident about about 6 years ago. I was driving a chevy Tracker (suzuki grand vitara) donw hill 2 lane road about 40. speed limit was 35. a cop was doing radar. this was 1/4 mile fro my front door. a honda civic. he made a turn onto my street from his street. he had a stop sign I did not his turn was a very "lazy" turn he cut the corner and I ended hitting him head on at 40 he was fully in my lane heading towards me. my daughter was in the car seat in the back. airbag deployed, the suv almost rolled over... pretty scary. especially for a 6 year old...

since then I lost two HHR's one with a very similar to the accident above, and another where a guy wanted to be in my lane and ran me off the road. (change lanes with out looking) thank fully he stayed behind and waited for the police. Hopefully the prius will change my luck.