Just been in a minor RTA. Who's fault is it?

[asim18]

Surely we're now just arguing semantics between the meaning of statistic and probability, either way there is evidence that a persons actions can have an effect on whether they are involved in a non fault event or not.

Exactly.

So are these people who CAN and DO avoid collisions taken into account? Insurers aren't going to know nor care that I have avoided dozens of accidents are they? Once someone hits me that's it, I'm just a statistic with no actual probability assessment.

Whether something is actually avoidable or unavoidable is critical. You cant assume everything is avoidable and then use it to push up a good driver's premiums simply because they fail to avoid 1 collision out of say 20.

 

[[TW]Fox]

They don't assume that, they assume that a proportion are avoidable and apply a weighing as a result. Yes this means Mr Perfect gets screwed and it means Mr Calamity probably gets off lightly but there isn't really much else they can do.

Some insurers don't load at all for non fault. Fair right? Well no, they are probably charging all policy holders a touch more...

 

[Havana_UK]

I have been in three non-fault "accidents" in the last 18 months, yet this is the first time in 12 years that I've had any accidents at all.

The first was when I was rear-ended whilst waiting to turn right into a petrol station. The petrol station entrance was about 5 yards from the exit of a major roundabout, I was stationery opposite the forecourt entrance but unable to enter because of queuing traffic waiting to join the roundabout, indicating, brake lights on (it's an auto), well over to the centre of the road on the white line, so it was plainly obvious what my intentions were. Despite this, the chap who came off that exit of the roundabout a good 30 seconds after me simply didn't notice that I wasn't moving and drove into the back of me. Visibility was good (bright Spring day). He admitted liability, his insurance settled quickly and the car was repaired. Apart from not being on the road at all I can think of nothing I could have done to avoid this incident.

The second "accident" was a careless fellow whose check-strap on his car was broken and as he got into his car, which was parked next to mine, his door swung open and hit my rear door, denting it. This again, was repaired, he accepted liability and his insurance dealt with it quickly. There were no other spaces for me to park in at the time I parked and I was well inside the white lines denoting the parking bay. Fortunately I was in the car at the time so was able to get all the details, otherwise, dare I say he was the sort of bloke who would've driven off without leaving any details. Again, I can think of no way that this could have been avoided other than not driving that day!

the third was again in a car park, this time a motorway services. I had parked out of the way as I habitually do whenever possible, and I was not in the car at the time. A car towing a caravan had entered the car park, and thinking he would park out of the way as well he chose to park up close to where I had parked. He changed his mind moments later deciding he was too long and possibly causing an obstruction so decided to drive out. In doing so the back corner of his caravan swung around and (without him knowing it) scraped down one side of my car. Fortunately another guy saw it happen and gave me all the details of the car, and between us we located the driver parked up in the lorry section. He was very apologetic, accepted liability and it's all been sorted. Again, I can think of no way other than not being on the road that I could done anything to mitigate this.

I now have these three non-fault claims on my insurance record, all pushing up my premium that little bit, yet the fact is I'm a higher risk anyway because of the amount of miles I do every year and therefore more likely to have a claim. Now I have, and I genuinely cannot think of anything I could have done in any of the three circumstances to reduce that risk, but I'm still hit with a premium increase (on an already fairly expensive premium).

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

Once you start looking at things with a deeper insight to actually find out why a parked car is prone to getting hit at the bottom of an icy hill it becomes a probability assessment, not a statistic.

Thanks I guess.

Yeah well I agree I switch up probability and statistics, frankly I care little about the difference as its not something I want to argue semantics about.

However, nice try to make a fuss about this when the jist of your original post was a crock of ****

I have been in three non-fault "accidents" in the last 18 months, yet this is the first time in 12 years that I've had any accidents at all.

The first was when I was rear-ended whilst waiting to turn right into a petrol station. The petrol station entrance was about 5 yards from the exit of a major roundabout, I was stationery opposite the forecourt entrance but unable to enter because of queuing traffic waiting to join the roundabout, indicating, brake lights on (it's an auto), well over to the centre of the road on the white line, so it was plainly obvious what my intentions were. Despite this, the chap who came off that exit of the roundabout a good 30 seconds after me simply didn't notice that I wasn't moving and drove into the back of me. Visibility was good (bright Spring day). He admitted liability, his insurance settled quickly and the car was repaired. Apart from not being on the road at all I can think of nothing I could have done to avoid this incident.

The second "accident" was a careless fellow whose check-strap on his car was broken and as he got into his car, which was parked next to mine, his door swung open and hit my rear door, denting it. This again, was repaired, he accepted liability and his insurance dealt with it quickly. There were no other spaces for me to park in at the time I parked and I was well inside the white lines denoting the parking bay. Fortunately I was in the car at the time so was able to get all the details, otherwise, dare I say he was the sort of bloke who would've driven off without leaving any details. Again, I can think of no way that this could have been avoided other than not driving that day!

the third was again in a car park, this time a motorway services. I had parked out of the way as I habitually do whenever possible, and I was not in the car at the time. A car towing a caravan had entered the car park, and thinking he would park out of the way as well he chose to park up close to where I had parked. He changed his mind moments later deciding he was too long and possibly causing an obstruction so decided to drive out. In doing so the back corner of his caravan swung around and (without him knowing it) scraped down one side of my car. Fortunately another guy saw it happen and gave me all the details of the car, and between us we located the driver parked up in the lorry section. He was very apologetic, accepted liability and it's all been sorted. Again, I can think of no way other than not being on the road that I could done anything to mitigate this.

I now have these three non-fault claims on my insurance record, all pushing up my premium that little bit, yet the fact is I'm a higher risk anyway because of the amount of miles I do every year and therefore more likely to have a claim. Now I have, and I genuinely cannot think of anything I could have done in any of the three circumstances to reduce that risk, but I'm still hit with a premium increase (on an already fairly expensive premium).

I had a risk assessment driving course from work as it is part of our reduced insurance cost premium.
One thing I had never thought of and thought was a bit anal but afterwards it makes sense and would apply to your situation 1, is that it is predictable that a poor driver could do exactly what that guy did and not see you, come off the roundabout too fast etc. What was said to me was always think if you can derisk a situation more, maybe a sightly different route or the key point for you on this, take a different entrance or use a different shop if the one you plan to use you know could be hazardous.
Its a fine line though, I mean to competely derisk you would never go out

 

[asim18]

Yeah well I agree I switch up probability and statistics, frankly I care little about the difference as its not something I want to argue semantics about.

However, nice try to make a fuss about this when the jist of your original post was a crock of ****

Thanks for confirming again. You, as a person who has worked in the insurance industry, care little about the difference between statistics and actual probability, and you actively "switch-up" the two. Thanks.

You've heard it folks, insurance is pretty much based on nonsense so they can make money.

How can you care little about probability and statistics?

Also it's not semantics lmao. They are entirely separate and non-interchangeable. One is basically a tally of **** that's already hit the fan and the other is a probability assessment of **** that is likely to hit the fan.

You have already been given several real world examples by Havana_UK as to how and why this elementarily flawed correlating of statistics and probability is absolutely baseless horse **** and you still think it's somehow OK to relate the two?

Again, I'm not surprised with your attitude considering you've admitted you had prior interest in insurance.

 

[Housey]

I am rather unforgiving about this sort of situation.

Way I see the situation is...

Driver "A" (the Merc) brakes to a halt (For whatever reason, Drivers do sometimes need to do this, it is not any business of any following drivers to question why, it just isn't! Following drivers have an obligation to allow for this possibility at any time!)

Driver "B" (The OP) initially either didn't notice or didn't believe it, or both, and as a result waited far to long before engaging brakes and then ended up having to brake really quite hard at the last seconds to avoid his own collision.

Driver "C" was also inattentive, he also wasn't on a the ball and, as a consequence, ended up braking late, hard, and as it happens, insufficiently to prevent a collision with driver "B".

Arguing that this makes driver "C" 100% responsible is nonsense.

All crunches are 50/50 unless you can make a very good case for otherwise! (Which IMO, does not apply here!)

Eh?

So your statement for Driver A all of a sudden doesn't apply to driver C? If the camera was in driver C's car, how would you have called it when Driver B braked for no apparent reason abruptly and Driver C then stoved into the back of him. To your very point the onus is on the following driver to make such an allowance but not when driver B is concerned it would seem. If driver C had left enough room, what driver B did would be irrelevant.

Not the best argument I've ever seen...

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

Thanks for confirming again. You, as a person who has worked in the insurance industry, care little about the difference between statistics and actual probability, and you actively "switch-up" the two. Thanks.

You've heard it folks, insurance is pretty much based on nonsense so they can make money.

How can you care little about probability and statistics?

Also it's not semantics lmao. They are entirely separate and non-interchangeable. One is basically a tally of **** that's already hit the fan and the other is a probability assessment of **** that is likely to hit the fan.

You have already been given several real world examples by Havana_UK as to how and why this elementarily flawed correlating of statistics and probability is absolutely baseless horse **** and you still think it's somehow OK to relate the two?

Again, I'm not surprised with your attitude considering you've admitted you had prior interest in insurance.

I worked in the industry yes, I am an accountant and was working as a specialised systems accountant hence why i was working with MI people etc

Whilst I have already explained to you why your wrong keep jumping up and down about something that to the vast majority of people is nothing but terminology. I could do just the same with the people who mix up profit and loss and balance sheet for example.

But I will repeat for you, not that I expect you will take any notice.
They spend a vast amount analysing (note I haven't mentioned probability or stats here) looking for past trends to be able to use them for commercial advantage.
One commercial advantage, in fact the main one, is to be able to correctly split the risks and therefore offer premiums based on the best model possible for predicting the risk of that insured. One of the commonly accepted risk factors identified is that people who have had non-fault claims show a history of being more likely to have another than those who have not. Its simple facts pulled from massive amounts of data that the actuaries would generate. The colour of a car also was detectable, as were plenty of other factors people easily accept like, age, driving experience etc

But then after very detailed analysis gets done the marketing people get to manipulate the target offerings.
Just taking two examples at a high level I remember from years ago.
Married men 35-45 with kids and a wife, typical mondeo driver at the time, was loss making business due to the market believing they were low risk drivers. Plenty of these about so a hard segment to ignore when needing a decent level of policies written to support the overheads.
25-35 year old single males with high performance cars were the top earning policies for the ins cos.
General population would not accept that "mondeo man" would cost on average more than "boy racer" and hence the premiums that could be charged were out of line with actual data.

So insurance is not based on nonsense, its based on lots of data with a hint of marketing. Its a highly competitive industry (arguably wasn't so much until direct line stirred it up). Any of the companies would take any opportunity to grab profitable business from the others when possible, so truly understanding the claims data was business critical.
Plenty of years insurance companies would only make money from the investments income whilst they had the premiums available before they needed to pay them out as claims. Its one of the reasons there is strict liquidity rules in place so they can't invest everything and not have the funds available to deal with claims.

You do make me laugh though expecting anyone who works in insurance to be an expert in stats, probability etc
The reality is that only a few people do, they are highly trained and have access to commercially sensitive material. The facts that I worked with these people directly was why I got involved and picked up bits of knowledge, I spent a lot of my time working under NDAs (non disclosure agreements) due to the sensitivity of the data I could have access to.
If you want to know who actually understands the stats/data/probabilities etc this will give you a good summary of the people who are inside ins cos working on this data
https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/actuary

 

[norm]

OP didn't brake nowhere near early enough. Hence why person behind didn't react in time, they weren't aware of the car stopped in front.

 

[Haggisman]

OP didn't brake nowhere near early enough. Hence why person behind didn't react in time, they weren't aware of the car stopped in front.

Irrelevant. You should leave a gap big enough that you can stop safely if the car in front performs an unexpected emergency brake. The OP did, the car behind them clearly didn't.

 

[asim18]

I worked in the industry yes, I am an accountant and was working as a specialised systems accountant hence why i was working with MI people etc

Whilst I have already explained to you why your wrong keep jumping up and down about something that to the vast majority of people is nothing but terminology. I could do just the same with the people who mix up profit and loss and balance sheet for example.

But I will repeat for you, not that I expect you will take any notice.
They spend a vast amount analysing (note I haven't mentioned probability or stats here) looking for past trends to be able to use them for commercial advantage.
One commercial advantage, in fact the main one, is to be able to correctly split the risks and therefore offer premiums based on the best model possible for predicting the risk of that insured. One of the commonly accepted risk factors identified is that people who have had non-fault claims show a history of being more likely to have another than those who have not. Its simple facts pulled from massive amounts of data that the actuaries would generate. The colour of a car also was detectable, as were plenty of other factors people easily accept like, age, driving experience etc

But then after very detailed analysis gets done the marketing people get to manipulate the target offerings.
Just taking two examples at a high level I remember from years ago.
Married men 35-45 with kids and a wife, typical mondeo driver at the time, was loss making business due to the market believing they were low risk drivers. Plenty of these about so a hard segment to ignore when needing a decent level of policies written to support the overheads.
25-35 year old single males with high performance cars were the top earning policies for the ins cos.
General population would not accept that "mondeo man" would cost on average more than "boy racer" and hence the premiums that could be charged were out of line with actual data.

So insurance is not based on nonsense, its based on lots of data with a hint of marketing. Its a highly competitive industry (arguably wasn't so much until direct line stirred it up). Any of the companies would take any opportunity to grab profitable business from the others when possible, so truly understanding the claims data was business critical.
Plenty of years insurance companies would only make money from the investments income whilst they had the premiums available before they needed to pay them out as claims. Its one of the reasons there is strict liquidity rules in place so they can't invest everything and not have the funds available to deal with claims.

You do make me laugh though expecting anyone who works in insurance to be an expert in stats, probability etc
The reality is that only a few people do, they are highly trained and have access to commercially sensitive material. The facts that I worked with these people directly was why I got involved and picked up bits of knowledge, I spent a lot of my time working under NDAs (non disclosure agreements) due to the sensitivity of the data I could have access to.
If you want to know who actually understands the stats/data/probabilities etc this will give you a good summary of the people who are inside ins cos working on this data
https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/actuary

I'm not even sure why you're going off on several tangents. Thanks for such a long post, although it was worth reading, I'm afraid it's got nothing much to do with any of my actual concerns.

Are you simply denying that cases like Havana_UK's exist? Are you saying he's slightly at fault even though it's non-fault? Are you saying 100% non-faults are still slightly the fault of the non-fault party simply because he's got a car?

I don't believe it's all based on nonsense, stats are certainly useful, my concern is with individual cases where people honestly get shafted through no fault of their own. My concern is with the extrapolation of basic and frankly disingenuous "stats" as a lazy and stupid method of risk assessment.

You've seen the examples posted here, imagine you're going down the motorway and someone overtaking you loses control on a right hand bend and swipes you both into the ditch. Would the innocent person's premium increase? If so why? I believe the increase should only be paid by the person at fault. If you disagree with my concerns, fair enough whatever.

I'm not disputing the statistics that people involved in non-fault accident will end up having 2 or more - this is actually an unbelievably elementary stat it's pretty much inevitable. My concern is for certain individuals for whom this data cannot be used to form a correct extrapolation and they honestly end up getting shafted after managing to be accident free for decades (examples in this thread). Anomalies are fundamental to any statistically founded extrapolation and you seem to be in a lot of denial.

Yes there are drivers out there who will crash into you and not bother hitting the brakes or avoiding something simply because they have "right of way" but there are also drivers out there who aren't idiots. Your Dependence on such elementary statistics simply means that you assume people who get involved in no-faults are slightly at fault and wrongly assumed that they could have done something to avoid it other than not driving at all!

 

[Tefal]

But what was that blue Merc thinking?!

im guessing "**** i'm in the wrong lane but not enough time to stop in the left so ill stop in the other lane an move over" then ****ed off when they saw the crash.

 

[ubersonic]

There's no reason for the blue Merc in front to stop

How do you know? Perhaps their air vent launched a speck of dust into their eye temporarily blinding them. There's many reasons a car might stop for no apparent reason, this is why we maintain safe distances as you did (and the guy behind you did not).

 

[Haggisman]

snip

As I've already posted, the resources required by insurance companies to fully monitor every drivers driving standards 24/7 would increase premiums for everyone, far in excess of any increases due to non fault accidents.

How does the insurance co know that you're normally a perfectly safe driver and the accident was 100% not your fault, vs you normally drive like a **** and it's a miracle this is your first accident?

 

[RyanF]

I blame the wipers

They do look juddery, maybe he should try waxing the windshield?

 

[norm]

Irrelevant. You should leave a gap big enough that you can stop safely if the car in front performs an unexpected emergency brake. The OP did, the car behind them clearly didn't.

The OP is still at partly at fault, even if for insurances purposes he's not, you can't drive in an erratic manner like this and expect not to be involved in anything untoward.

If he'd showed a bit of forward planning and observation he could have saved himself all the hassle involved in an insurance claim.

 

[RJC]

Closed as requested.