Reader question:

I got into a car accident recently. It wasn’t my fault, but the other person refused to exchange car insurance information with me. What am I supposed to do now?

Angela

That’s an interesting situation, Angela.

I think your situation is one of the reasons why you always have to be on the top of your game when you’re making a quality car insurance claim, and when you get into a car accident. This is why I always advise people to tell their car insurance companies about an accident even if the other party says they’re okay and won’t make a claim. So long as they have our car insurance information, there is always a possibility. However, refusal to hand over insurance quality car insurance information is not a common occurence.

There are a few things that you can do now, but most of them depend on how vigilant you were at the time. The first and best way that I would suggest for you to settle this is to contact the Department of Motor Vehicles for your state and use the person’s driver’s license number or the number on their license plate to get their insurance information. You’ll probably end up using the license plate number because if they won’t give you their insurance information, then I highly doubt they’ll give you their driver’s license number.

Don’t have the license plate number? Don’t panic! If you’ve been taking my advice, then you should have taken pictures at the scene of the accident. Look through them and find out if one of the pictures has the license plate in view. If not, then you should know better for next time–never let the at fault driver get away without leaving you with some kind of information, preferably something that can be used to find out more information.

If that first option didn’t work out for you, then the next one is a bit mre drastic: call the police. I know this sounds a little far, but if it is what you have to do, then it is what you have to do. I wouldn’t take this step unless I was sure that I absolutely needed to make a claim–that is, if the repairs are more than I could easily afford and absolutely if there were injuries. The person who didn’t give you their information was wrong, but was probably just freaked out. It’s best to try all of the other ways before getting down to this.

Of course, you can only call the police if you have an accurate description of the driver and their car. Again, this is where those pictures might come in handy. You’re not going to get anywhere saying that a blond guy in a red car crashed into you. If it was an actual hit and run, then I would say this is the very first recourse you need to go to. Remember that this is why you need to stay as lucid as you can when you get into a car accident, because panicking will only make it harder to remember things later.

The last option is for if you are not willing to go through with calling the police. In this case, you are going to have to take some punishment for yourself. Here, the best that you can do is to just make a claim as if the entire thing was your fault and get it paid out of your collision car insurance. This means that your rates will go up, unless it is your first at fault accident, in which case most quality car insurance companies will forgive. However, even in that case you have just lost your one chance at accident forgiveness for a few years.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.