Can the final outcome (who was responsible for the accident) be effected by the quality of your insurance company. Can a cheap car insurance plan make it more likely for a decision of “your fault”?
I recently got into an accident in a parking lot. I backed up into a delivery truck. I was backing out slow and looking both ways. He was also moving at quite a good rate of speed. I got clipped about 4 feet out of the spot, took off my bumper and messed up my trunk.
Well to skip to the end, after a week of hearing that my insurance company was trying to pin the blame on the other guy, they decided it was my fault and sent me the check for the damages.
Good thing I had collision, the accident was debatable and there were no witnesses, but after hearing stories of similar decisions with the same insurance company in much more ovbious cases, I began to wonder if the qulity of your insurance matters that much when it comes to who’s footing the bill.
I’m not sure about how it works where you live, but it’s probably similar to the situation here in Australia: if you have a motor vehicle accident on a public road, then the police report will carry a heck of a lot of weight when the insurance companies are doing their thing. If, like in your case, the accident happens on private property (where there are technically no road rules), then it gets a whole lot more messy.
I’m not an expert, but the situation you describe sounds like one in which a reasonable person would be on your side, but the law may not be. You may well have been careful, looked both ways, etc, and the truck might have been going too fast for the conditions, but the truck driver’s, “Man, I was just going straight along and this guy backed right out in front of me” is probably going to be a convincing argument in the eyes of an insurance assessor (who wasn’t there at the time).
There probably is an element of “you get what you pay for” in insurance. For years I was with an insurance company which had a reputation of “they’re not the cheapest, but you don’t get any grief when you make a claim”, but this year their quote was up in the stratosphere (there’s an insurance crisis in Australia at the moment), so I changed companies. Guess I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed.
I’m not entirely sure that I understand your story. but I have acted for insurance clients for a number of years and I know that sometimes the word will come through: " things are tight, use any excuse to decline a claim." Presumably that would occur more often on average in companies with cheap premiums. But the two things are not by any means directly related.
An insurance company might decide to make a strategic push into a particular market and might consequently decide to both lower premium rates and go easy on claims, so as to please customers and “expand the book”.
And finally, while you are probably just speaking loosely, you do realise that insurance companies don’t have any power to definitively decide whose fault an accident was, don’t you? They just make a call which affects their first instance judgment on what they pay or do not pay.
Ultimately you would very likely have access to a court or other arbiter for a definitive decision
I think the biggest problem for “at fault” is whether rates will go up or not, but being from a no-fault state I don’t know if this is what Mirage is concerned about or not. Essentially, with no-fault insurance, fault doesn’t matter – the claim will get paid. But this also means that if you’re an idiot and have nothing but PL/PD, and you wreck your car, you won’t get a settlement, even if the other guy was 100% at fault, and you can only demand the other driver up to a maximum of $500, taking the percent of fault into consideration, e.g., if the other driver is 50% at fault, you can only recover $250.
So, this is a good system that’s only slightly more expensive than non-no-fault insurance, but very simple and keeps most lawsuits out of the courts (you can sue, but they’re usually dismissed due to no-fault laws). However, fault and negligence enter the picture, and they’re not necessarily the same.
Once, I too backed out of a parking spot (well, I do that frequently, but…) and hit a crane (not a bird, but a big piece of construction equipment). Certainly I was 100% at fault and the adjuster of course agreed. But they found me not negligent, so no rate hikes or bad marks on my insurance record.
Maybe some other day I’ll explain how I hit a crane without being negligent.
