Car Insurance Accident Liability – How To Determine Who Is At Fault?

Reader question:

How do you prove liability and responsibility in a vehicle insurance accident?

Ennis

That is a very good question, Ennis.

When you get into a car accident and you weren’t the cause of it, many would start out by seeing red. They might want to toss out insults and make demands to the at fault driver’s vehicle insurance company. However, the problem with this is that saying it does not make it so. You can’t just demand that your car insurance company realize who is the driver that should be liable in a certain situation, because there has to be more proof beyond just the words of the two drivers involved, considering that much of the time both will be vouching for their own side of the story.

Liability comes down to one basic factor, and that is the carelessness, or negligence, of the drivers. If one of the drivers is found to have been more careless than the other driver, than that driver will have to pay more of the car insurance claim costs than the driver who was not as careless. However, carelessness is not the singular factor. There are others, as follows.

• If the person who was injured in the collision was in a place that they had no business being, and the other driver had no reasonable reason to think that they or anybody else might be there. It’s like if you drive into a dark alley in the middle of the night to park and you run over someone sleeping on the ground. People have to sleep, but an alleyway is not the normal place for that, so the driver can not be considered careless for driving into a dark place to park and to dodging the people.
• Now, there are some cases where the person who was injured was careless, but so was the person doing the driving. As an example, if you run out into the middle of the street in your neighborhood and get hit by a car. Now, the car should be taking care while driving in a neighborhood and go slowly, because there are plenty of children and pets who are more likely than adults to run into the street randomly. On the second hand, you were stupid to have run into the street. This is called comparative negligence, and both of you would have to pay for the percent that was determined to have been your fault.
• If the collision happens on or involving some kind of property that is not safe, for reasons of being badly made or not well kept up, or for any reason really other than that you just crashed into it, then the owner will hold part of the responsibility, even if it isn’t his fault that the property is in this condition.
• If the motor vehicle accident is caused because one of the vehicles is defected in some way, then the blame falls on neither driver but instead on both the manufacturer of the car and the person who sold it, regardless of which of them is actually fully responsible for the defect.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Auto Insurance Claim – How To Prove Negligence?

Reader question:

What does it mean to be negligent in an auto insurance accident when making an auto insurance claim?

Mallory

That’s an excellent question.

The word negligent is a term used in the legal sphere to speak of an action that was caused as result of carelessness on the part of the negligent driver. This is often used concerning people, as in a negligent parent is someone who does not watch their child well enough and the child runs out into the woods and is eaten by a bear. In driving, negligent is much the same in that one driver’s careless action causes damage to another person or someone else’s property. For example, say you are passing through an intersection that has stop signs. While you’re in the middle of the intersection, another vehicle drives up to the stop sign that is perpendicular to you, fails to see it, and keeps right on going, and then smashes into the middle of your vehicle. You would have no fault in an accident such as this, because the second driver was completely negligent and didn’t keep an eye out for stop signs and other drivers.

Even direct acts involving the driving itself are not the limits when it comes to the word negligent as it is used concerning auto insurance claims. For instance, say someone who thinks they are especially cool goes driving after dark while wearing dark sunglasses. This person would then have a much lower visibility and could easily miss something and cause an accident. They would be considered negligent, and thus, at fault, because their silliness in wearing the glasses lowered their ability to drive responsibly and thus indirectly caused an auto accident.

Negligence is usually what is used to figure out who is the one who is at fault in a car accident and auto insurance claim, and it isn’t until negligence (or the occasional purposeful act) is found out that someone can be considered the at fault driver. If the other driver in your car accident is found to have acted carelessly, that is, to have been negligent, then they are responsible for any trouble they have caused you. Thi can extend from injuries and damages to your vehicle to anguish that you have suffered from the collision.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.