Car Insurance Claim

Almost eight months ago, I was driving carefully on rather dangerous seven lane road in the West Midlands. I wasn’t too daunted. I’d learn to drive near there and in my first months of driving I used that road frequently. I was keeping to the speed limit, and I was in the third lane – maybe the second, my memory has faded now – but anyway the inner of the two lanes which got under the city and carries on out the other side as the A38. I was doing about 48 miles an hour, as was everybody else.
Suddenly, I noticed a car coming towards me at the side.
“What the heck’s he doing?” I thought.
As often in accidents, you have two memories of it – one that you were taken completely by surprise, and one that you saw it coming, in slow motion.
The car, inevitably, hit mine on the passenger side. My car spun round. As it glided towards the wall, I tried to keep calm and remembered that you should drive into a skid, not try to pull out of it. I still don’t know how I didn’t manage to hit anybody. The car did, of course, eventually hit the wall.
In fact, I was remarkably calm until the car stopped, and then I started shaking like a leaf, dialled 999, meaning to ask for the police and asked for an ambulance and then remembered to ask for the police.
I couldn’t get out of my car.
They all came.
The paramedic checked me over – no sign of any damage except a racing heart, and a slight pain in the neck and me feeling completely dazed and bewildered. The paramedic, bless him, kept calling me “Babe” and would not leave me until my hear rate returned to normal.
The police were good – taking down the details of other cars, but they wouldn’t get involved because I apparently wasn’t hurt.
Well, we won’t mention the months of not being able to sleep well, because of the discomfort of my neck, or the driving phobia which I experienced for several months. Gone, now, thank goodness, though, my heart does always start racing when I see a car comng towards my passengar side.
And, of course, there’s the day’s income I lost because I didn’t get to the school I was visiting. If you’re self-employed, and you don’t work, you don’t get paid.
Then there were the non-conversations with the Indian call centre, with a little man insisting on a post code, when any local would know what was meant by the description the police had given me of where I was. I was left for almost two hours in one of the seediest pats of Birmingham. So much for getting out to a lone woman within an hour. But there was a CCTV on me. It didn’t stop me getting chatted up by an old tramp, though. That incident would have been funny, if it hadn’t have been so dangerous.
Goodness knows how many times I’ve described the accident to various people associated with the insurance company, both orally and in writing. We’re still paying the higher rate for the insurance premiums.
I actually don’t let it get me down. It’s just a part of 21st century life. But I saw red yesterday when I had a letter from my solicitor saying that the lorry driver involved claimed I wasn’t hit and I merely panicked and swerved. I resent that. If I’d panicked in any way, the accident would have been far worse.
I’m left with the impression that unless someone admits liability on the spot – and our insurance companies instruct us never to – these claims just don’t get settled. Fortunately, in the past, one or two people have admitted faults. Are they now unable to insure?