The baby has it’s own airbags (ok hydroshock system). Good to hear you’re both OK.
I just switched to Progressive! It’s nice to hear an endorsement of their claim service =) although I haven’t needed to use it… knock on wood
Hopefully you won’t, especially not for something like this guy had to use it for. I wonder what they were like when they were talking to him. Do insurance companies berate people for getting into at-fault accidents, or do they just raise their rates?
I can actually answer that, since I take claims for auto (also, other lines of business like work comp, liability, and property). I can tell you that no, there is no beration involved. *Especially *not when reporting the claim. Even when the insured is reporting what is clearly an at-fault accident and tries to blame the other person (which happens more than it should), we are still nice to them.
I don’t know how many wrecks are reported to us every day, but it’s approximately a metric shitload (at least a couple thousand claims a day… at least). And in every one of those, somebody is at fault. It’d be pretty presumptuous and nasty of us (also stupid) to treat our insureds like lepers for causing a wreck. Any company who did that would start losing business really fast. Personal auto insurance is fairly cutthroat, and compassion is the expected standard in the business.
I could see an adjuster getting shirty if an insured started to cuss them out, but that’s really the only time. When you adjudicate dozens of accidents a week, though, you realize that bad things happen to good people all the time. There’s no point in making someone feel worse who already feels bad or stressed or guilty or sad or angry.
My training as an intake rep (I’m not an adjuster) is to be kind and compassionate to everyone, regardless if I personally think they did something stupid or not. And if someone starts berating themselves, I usually fall back on the line, “That’s why we call them accidents!” A small fender-bender like the one you were in wouldn’t cause even the slightest eye-raise. I mean, yeah, if the guy is at fault then his rates are going to go up. But that’s a decision the underwriting department makes, not anyone in claims. And we don’t attribute moral failing to someone who caused an accident. Shit happens to everybody!
Yeah, I guess there wouldn’t be all those commercials for it and all the junk mail we get regarding car insurance if it weren’t a fairly competitive market.
Now my car is fine. I got it back from the body shop this morning. I can’t tell where the damage was. The body shop took about the amount of time they said they would.
How are you doing emotionally? I got rear ended while sitting at a light a couple years ago and I still give myself room to escape when I’m stopped with traffic coming up behind me. I stare in my rear view until the car behind me is fully stopped.
I imagine being hit while pregnant would quadruple that anxiety.
Glad you’re okay. I had an accident on the 10th with my Mustang whereby my neighbor directly across the street from me and I backed into one another without seeing each other. Our driveways both are pretty steep downslopes to the houses, so we were both backing up a hill, looking left, looking right, then BAM!
$1500 in damage to my baby for a 5mph collision. No fault assessed in the accident, but I still have to pay my deductible. I’m actually picking up the car today here in a few minutes.
whew Thank God you and the baby are ok!
It’s a bit hard to separate it out from everything else that’s going on. I’m a little more nervous when I’m driving, but I’m more upset about my cat being sick than about the accident.