Thursday, April 17, 2008

Vehicle Accident - My Experience

Last week my car was rear ended by another car while I was driving in a busy road. The speed limit of that road was just 25miles/hour and I can't believe how can someone just rear ended my car with the traffic at that time.

The vehicles were moving very slowly and suddenly I heard a big bang and my car went few feet to the front and sightly knock the car in front of me. The sound and the shock made me think that probably the entire trunk of my car is lost. Surprisingly, the only damaged part in my car was the raer buffer. However, the other person's car was badly damaged with all the air bags deployed and the radiator broken and causing lot of smoke.

Luckily nobody was hurt.

The driver of the car get down from the vehicle saying "I am sorry" and that simply removed the anger developing inside me towards that driver.

After that, for me, the procedure was very straight forward.
Got the police report
Call the other person's insurence Agent
Get a quotation from a repair shop
Give it to the insurance agent
Put the vehicle for repair
Use the rented car arranged by the insurance agent during the time my car is in garage
Bring the car home without paying a cent.

I know that it is too good to be true and many does not experience the same, but for some reason, that is exactly what has happened to me.

Still I am not sure what causes that person to hit my car. My only guess is he was distracted by something (most probably by his cell phone) and did not see me stopping at all. I came to this conclusion because of few observations I made.
I did not hear him breaking before the crash.
His left arm was slightly bruised, probably because he was holding his phone from that hand.
Even after the accident, he was getting lot of phone calls.

In any case, I have noticed that almost all the people drive with one hand on the cellphone. It seems like most of them can't drive without talking to someone over the phone. Even at color lights, it takes at least half a minute for some people to realize that the green light is on, simply because they are busy talking over the phone.

Hope they have some law prohibiting the usage of phone while driving as in my country Sri Lanka.