Money Box, radio 4 12.00 - may be worth listening to
"How would you react if out of the blue you were told by your insurance company that you have been involved in a car accident of which you had no knowledge?
And then your insurer would tell you when the accident happened but not where so you couldn't even prove you were somewhere else? That is exactly what happened to one Money Box listener.
Bob Howard has been discovering such false allegations are not that rare."
|
|
There was a promotion for the programme on the Breakfast show this morning. Could be a problem if renewal time is near and you get stonewalled.
|
Mrs F has had this twice. Once about 20yrs ago it was claimed she had forced some guy off the road into a hedge.... which she hadn't.
Her insurance co told his people to get lost and they did.
More recently there was a claim against her for an accident involving a car she'd sold a month before the date of the claimed incident. When they were informed she'd sold the car the chancers said they'd made a mistake on the date and changed it to be within the period she owned the car. Again they were told to get lost and that was the last we heard.
In neither case was there any impact on renewal.
|
Chancers, yep plenty of them about.
I was dragged in the office many years ago and had been reported via the 0800shopme number for ripping the door mirror off a car on Kew Bridge, no doubt a claim would have followed, had i not proveably been in Grimethorpe (Nth Yorks) at the time.
|
i got a letter from an insurer saying my car was involved in a hit and run in london a few years ago
i soon nipped that one in the bud through my own insurer and my insurance protection scheme
|
|
And what's the betting the proposed solution to stop innocent drivers being collared is to install some kind of tracking device in your car so you can prove where it was...
|
(a) Does an incident count as an accident if your car isn't damaged?
(b) It should be easy to prove whether or not your car has suffered accident damage in the position claimed by your your insurer.
|
|
In one of the cases cited on the program, a driver was told by her insurers (the Prudential, iirc) that her vehicle had been in an accident on a given date, but they couldn't give her any more information as they didn't have any. I must be missing something, but I can't see why they are taking seriously a claim of an accident at a given date with a given vehicle, location unknown ?
|
|
There ought to be a market for a device like a plane black box, which simply keeps a record of exactly where the car was at any time over say the last 3 months. Then if challenged, all you do is plug it into a computer and read off the date/location.
|
That is a great idea, unless you're hobby is murdering prosttutes :). I would probably have one fitted though.
Edit isn't that what a tracker is?
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Sat 8 Jan 11 at 21:10
|
|
Doesn't prove you didn't run someone off the road in that area though?
|
|
And if the claim comes in two months later, all your previous data has been overwritten.
|
|
True, but what I had in mind would have a much longer storage, and would have no other purpose than as a simple alibi-verifier against speeding tickets from the other end of the country. A bit like carrying a throw away camera just in case.
|
I've a road hawk in my octy. Its pretty well thought out, as well as video it'll record movement in the car, so if you accelerate, steer, brake or go over a bump, it'll show that along with road speed.
It partitions the space in two, 70% of the space (configurable) records the last ~6 hours driving, the other 30% keeps any 30 second clips where there was more than 0.6 G force (configurable) or you pressed the hazard button. Because that happens so rarely, it goes back to when I first got it.
For my money now, I'd go for one of the cheaper alternatives with the better video quality.
|
Phantom accidents - Old Navy
