A little background: my wife and I are 49 years old. We have near-perfect driving records; neither of us has ever been in an accident, we have always had the same insurance provider, and in 33 years we have never made an insurance claim.
Our 16 year old daughter drives a 1998 Ford Taurus. Yesterday she was involved in a three-vehicle wreck just outside her high school. She rear-ended a Geo Tracker. And then the Tracker rear-ended the car in front of it. So a three-car chain-reaction, with our daughter initiating it. She was cited for it. Our daughter’s car was towed away.
Herearesome pics of our daughter’s car. Herearesomepics of the car she hit. I don’t have pics of the other car. Based on the pics, I would assume our daughter’s car is a total loss.
There were no reports of injuries. Our daughter is a little shook up but otherwise fine.
So what should do I do next? Should I immediately contact our insurance company or offer to pay for their repairs out-of-pocket?
My coworker told me a scenario that could happen if I do not immediately contact our insurance company: “Let’s say you do not contact your insurance company and pay for their repairs out-of-pocket. Think you’re in the clear, right? But a couple months later the driver of the Tracker could complain of ‘neck pain’ and they get a lawyer. At this point you get nervous and contact your insurance company, and they say, ‘You should have contacted us immediately after the accident occurred. Because you failed to do so, we are not covering any medical claims. Sorry, Charlie.’” Is this accurate? If so, how about I immediately contact our insurance company but tell them I am going to pay for the repairs? I guess I’m just nervous about or rates skyrocketing due to this.
Call your insurance company. Start the claims process. Paying out of pocket is fine for minor damage, but you’ve got a major claim here. Your rates will go up, hopefully not too much.
I am in almost the exact same boat as you, age wise, driving record wise and daughter wise. Mine had 2 accidents and 2 tickets in her first 3 years of driving. It’s part of the deal :eek:
You can’t cover everything that will result from this. My son’s GF was recently involved in something like that, there’s going to be repairs and potential liability. You don’t want to deal with it, put this in the hands of the insurance company.
I don’t really understand the motivation for your apparent suggestion that there might be some advantage to paying for the other car’s damage and not telling your insurance company. What possible benefit could be gained from that? There’s obviously huge damage to your daughter’s car, and potential liability. This is not the time to be worrying about your future insurance premiums rising, if that’s your concern. They may do, but that can’t be helped at this point. Certainly no conceivable good can come of hiding anything here from your insurance company or offering to pay for things yourself. Fortunately nobody was hurt seriously, and you are insured to cover the substantial financial loss and potential liability. That’s exactly what insurance is for. Put everything in the hands of your insurers immediately.
You don’t know what all is going on with the car she hit. It could have a crumpled exhaust system and need a new catalytic converter, muffler, and pipe, plus damage to the chassis alignment, which is very expensive to repair.
Someone rear-ended us once when he slid on some grass while pulling over for an emergency vehicle, so he wasn’t cited, but his insurance was responsible for our repairs, and it was several thousand dollars, even though at first blush it just looked like our hatch was dented a little, and my husband drove away from the accident. We needed the chassis aligned, the wheels aligned on an AWD, and the exhaust replaced from the firewall back, in addition to needing the hatch replaced.
Not to mention, you probably want the totaled vehicle replaced. Unless you have collision only on it, so there is no payout, you probably want to make that claim. Whatever your insurance is raised, it can’t be as much as the payments on a new vehicle.
Whoa. Glad there are no immediately apparent injuries. But that does not guarantee that there are no injuries. The adrenaline rush in the immediate aftermath of a collision can mask pain. And bruises or slow internal bleeding can take some time to become evident.
Contact your insurance company. This is what you pay them for.
Look like you are in Ohio. Since she received a traffic ticket, you or your daughter will need to file aProof of Financial Responsibility Form BMV 3135 if this has not already been done. This confirms with the state BMV that she was covered under the required insurance liability policy. The owner and/or driver will have their license suspended if this is not filed.
I’m not concerned about our daughter’s car. I haven’t seen it firsthand (it was was towed to… somewhere?), but based on the photos it’s probably not worth fixing. It was a fairly old car. I didn’t pay much for it, and we didn’t have collision insurance on it.
I have zero experience in making an insurance claim - for home and auto - hence the reason for my OP. I was just wondering if there was a valid way to minimize the impact to our insurance premiums. Doesn’t sound like there is…
Uh, wherever it was towed to, the tow yard guy is running up a storage fee, until either you or the insurance company gives him permission to junk it. You need to get that taken care of. When we got rear-ended once, and we had to bargain with the insurance company to pay us what we were owed, we had to remember to call the tow guy (he claimed the storage fee for about four or five days was $300) and ask him what his fee was, and add that to the entire ask to the insurance company. If this is going to drag out, you may want to have the thing towed to your driveway, if you have one, or figure a way to authorize having it sent to the junkyard ASAP. If you own it outright, you can authorize it, and if you aren’t planning on making a claim for it, then maybe you should do so, but if you have a lien on it, you probably can’t; it has to be declared totaled by an insurance adjuster. At least that was our understanding. We owned the car that was totaled.and the bike in the trunk that was also totaled, which we also claimed. Thank gawd our dogs weren’t with us.
Another vote for call the insurance company. They’ll cover your car as take care of everything else from here on out. Yes, you’ll take a hit on your rates, but that’s better then the person two cars up coming after you in a few weeks because they finally got around to taking their car to the shop because it’s been driving funny and it turns out part of the frame is bent.
Also, did she have an unbuckled passenger? That’s how it looks, I know with my insurance, all my payouts are different if anyone* in the car isn’t wearing a seatbelt.
Also, I don’t know if this is the case with car insurance, but I know with some types of insurance, if you wait too long to make the claim (ie if your trying to see if you can pay it yourself), they’ll deny the claim just based on the amount of time between the incident and when you report it.
*Now that I think about it, I’m not sure if it’s anyone, or just the driver.
I concur with everyone else. Call your insurance company, that’s why you have them.
What will happen is they will take all of the information and deal with it for you. Sometime in the very near future they will call back and take a statement from your daughter; this can be done over the phone. After that it’s pretty much entirely in their hands. This is a good thing, because you really don’t want to be dealing with this on your own.
On an marginally related note, I haven’t seen a Geo Tracker in years! That company was absorbed back into Chevy like 20 years ago. If it’s actually branded as a Geo it’s practically antique!
ETA: like Joey P above, I’m also curious about the damage to the windshield; was there a bowling ball in the passenger seat or something?
Reporting it to the police is even more important. There is a steep fine for failure to report a accident. Although you may offer to settle up privately, if the damage is below a certain dollar value, which varies by state, but is typically about $200 – laws get old and ignore inflation (except for the fines).
Did she exchange insurance information with the other drivers? In that case, her insurance company has probably already been contacted. But Yes, that is what insurance is for – to settle up the damages that have been occasioned by your driving.
Call the insurance company- “pay for it yourself” is only for cases where you know the damages are relatively minor and no one was injured. Like taking the mirror off or dinging the door of a parked car with no occupants. This isn’t that - you have no photos of the third car , you can’t really tell what the damages are even of the car you have photos of (it doesn’t look bad, but you don’t know what happened underneath) and while no one reported any injuries at the time, that doesn’t mean there weren’t any injuries. Especially since it looks like a passenger hit the windshield.
They’ll definitely find out about the ticket. Insurances companies don’t step in to pay out money though, if you tell them you want to pay for the damages yourself they’re going to say “Good idea! You should do that.”
The problem with paying yourself is that you’d get ripped off. The other drivers will exaggerate their damage estimates and you, unlike your insurance company, don’t have the experience to see that this is happening. Keep in mind that the insurance company people do this every day of the year and have seen every scam out there.
Another reason to involve the insurance company is that one of the other parties may claim injuries due to the accident. (Not all that unexpected, given that they were rear-ended.)
I’m not sure that the reference was to the police filing the report. It may have been that the police must receive a report from the drivers.
For example, in my state if any person has property damage over $1000 every driver must file a report with the DMV. No matter if the accident is on private property or the street. It is entirely possible that some states require the driver to file a similar report with the police department- which is not the same as police responding to the scene and filing their own report.
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Isn’t there something on your insurance card that tells you when you’re involved in an accident, call the insurance company right away? There’s probably even an 800 number. There is on mine.
Around here (Milwaukee, WI), the police will come out in those cases* and fill out a non-reportable accident form. It’s basically just a paper that explains what happened, who was going in which direction, where the damage is on each car, a statement from each driver and any witnesses and then each driver’s DL, insurance and contact information. The officer gives each person a copy and while I assume they keep a copy as well, from what I’ve always been told it doesn’t get ‘reported’ to anyone. No one will ever know that the accident occurred just due to that piece of paper existing.
It’s not a ‘police report’ in the usual sense (it’s actually a driver report), but even having that filled out is better than nothing. Since it’s done sooner, everyone’s memory is fresher and, possibly more importantly, people are less likely to bend the truth or outright lie on them with an officer standing over them, especially if the officer is at the scene and the one filling out the report.
*In some jurisdictions the police will request that both parties come to the police station and fill it out there.
Yep, exactly. Which is why I pointed out that jtur’s answer was too simplistic. What should be reported and to whom varies greatly based on jurisdiction and circumstance. The only “standard” process is to call your insurance company. Most auto policies (we all read every page, right?) mandate that every accident, regardless of damage or circumstance, be reported to them. Impossible to enforce, but there nonetheless.
