Car insurance claim - magistrate court

cw8825

Arunmor said:

OP were you driving past parked cars on your left?

I'm still trying to get a picture in my mind which is exactly what the judge will be trying to do.

unfortunately so is the OP

from what i have pieced together.
OP was stationary and has pulled away after picking up his wife
The TP has travelling from behind but against the flow of traffic (the wrong way up the lane)
The TP's front light has made contact with the drivers door of the OP

OP said the road ahead was clear - so TP hasn't come from in front and done a massive U turn
wife in the rear has seen the TP possibly making a manoeuvre

IMO its reasonable to think OP moving from a parked position is at the very least contributing to this, 
OP has admitted at some point moving from parked position, its safe to assume the TP/TPI will be claiming the same
He says I could have taken action to prevent the collision, or at least mitigate the damage

Mildly_Miffed

DullGreyGuy said:

Mildly_Miffed said:

One interpretation of your description could be that this was in slow-moving traffic, you were trying to stop somebody from "pushing in" , and you closed them out a bit too vehemently.

The OP has stated they were parked at the side of the road and pulled away, not in slow moving traffic. 

Good point. I missed that.

So twenty metres from pulling away, they were hit by somebody "overtaking" them. Somebody they never saw at all...

Mmm.

There is an obvious answer here.

Aretnap

Okell said:

raddy59 said:

... I don't want to go to court over this - but if I dont LV - the  insurance company says it will go down as 50/50 and will affect my future premiums.
Any advice/observations much appreciated

I'm pretty much 100% certain that the T&Cs of your insurance policy will say that you must attend court if required to do so by your insurer - otherwise your insurnace will be invalidated.

In theory the insurer could probably try to hold the OP liable for us costs if he point blank refused to go to court. In practice it would be unusual for them to attempt to enforce this. There's little incentive for an insurer to try to force someone into court against their will - a witness who doesn't want to be there is unlikely to make a good witness. Not too mention the bad publicity. 

However as noted, refusing to go to court DOES mean that there would be nobody to contradict the other party's version of events so the other driver would almost certainly win (in practice the OP's insurer would fold well before it got to court in those circumstances) meaning it would end up as a fault claim from the OP's point of view, with all that means for his no claims discount and future premiums.

LightFlare

Mildly_Miffed said:

DullGreyGuy said:

Mildly_Miffed said:

One interpretation of your description could be that this was in slow-moving traffic, you were trying to stop somebody from "pushing in" , and you closed them out a bit too vehemently.

The OP has stated they were parked at the side of the road and pulled away, not in slow moving traffic. 

Good point. I missed that.

So twenty metres from pulling away, they were hit by somebody "overtaking" them. Somebody they never saw at all...

Mmm.

There is an obvious answer here.

Would have to agree - based on this statement, I think I have a reasonably clear view of what might have happened.

Still not clear why it’s going to court though as insurance companies usually revert and agree to 50/50 if the two accounts dont agree with each other

cw8825

LightFlare said:

Mildly_Miffed said:

DullGreyGuy said:

Mildly_Miffed said:

One interpretation of your description could be that this was in slow-moving traffic, you were trying to stop somebody from "pushing in" , and you closed them out a bit too vehemently.

The OP has stated they were parked at the side of the road and pulled away, not in slow moving traffic. 

Good point. I missed that.

So twenty metres from pulling away, they were hit by somebody "overtaking" them. Somebody they never saw at all...

Mmm.

There is an obvious answer here.

Would have to agree - based on this statement, I think I have a reasonably clear view of what might have happened.

Still not clear why it’s going to court though as insurance companies usually revert and agree to 50/50 if the two accounts dont agree with each other

Imagine it’s a case of the one company refusing any liability at all. 

chrisw

I think there must be some information missing in this thread. From what I've read here, in my opinion, the OP appears to be at fault, or at best 50/50. However, the fact that the insurance company are prepared to defend it in court suggests they are aware of something i'm not.

boobyd

raddy59 said:

cw225 - i just picked my wife up from her mothers where I had been parked. I got to about 12mph still in second gear. His  car was travelling against the flow of traffic - he wanted to make a left turn into his driveway, but why he had crossed so far out I do't know.  His fron t#light, my car scraped from the driver door bck

You had stopped/parked to pick up wife.At same time a resident was coming home he had parked cars on the left so he was in the opposing lane to enter his drive x amount of metres away,you didn't see him and he didn't see you/indicating moving away?(Being "so far out" can only be as wide as road.
A diagram would be useful.

caprikid1

"I was driving very slowly down a 2 lane road (one lane each direction). My road ahead was clear. I had travelled less than 20 metres, doing 12mph max,  when a car hit my car obliquely from the other side of the road - the other car was travelling in the same direction as me i.e. against the flow of his lane."

I think its clear what happened, the car that hit you was going round parked car / cars so had positioned on the outside lane, you then failed to spot him and  pulled out on him / into him.

I think the other driver can paint a clear picture of you pulled out when it was not clear to do so, if you had only reached 12mph that really makes it sound likely, the fact you don't know where he came from says you just did not see him. From where he hit you with photo's etc I'm not sure how you would get this to his fault to be honest.

DullGreyGuy

chrisw said:

I think there must be some information missing in this thread. From what I've read here, in my opinion, the OP appears to be at fault, or at best 50/50. However, the fact that the insurance company are prepared to defend it in court suggests they are aware of something i'm not.

Well it took a while to tease out of the OP what really happened, the initial painted picture was that they were correctly proceeding down the road when a random vehicle driving on the wrong side of the road drove into the side of them. 

You'd have hoped that they tried to get more detail out of them but it's another gap in our knowledge and we are also still missing the third party version of events. 

Depending on how claims teams are structured you can get fairly basically trained teams asking questions like if the OP is willing to attend court or not. That can be less an indication that proceedings are about to be issued but instead can decide which other technical team it will go to. If the OP isn't willing to attend then there is no point passing it over to a team that looks to pursue the third party and makes more sense to go to a team thats more focused on defence work.