Car Insurance - The Blame
Culture
We could write a book here about the 'common
law tort of negligence'. There are plenty of legal text
books available which when deciphered tell us that it
basically boils down to 'use your common sense, and that is
a good way to form an opinion of who is to blame.
Let's just qualify that a little. In order to
be negligent you must:
1) owe a duty of care - e.g. you owe a duty of
care to other road users. But do you owe a duty of care to the
man half a mile away on a bus, which gets held up in the
resultant traffic jam, not to make him late home from work? No
- it is too remote. So your duty of care is to the road users
around and about you.
2) you have to cause a breach of that duty.
3) the breach of duty has to flow from the duty
of care
4) your breach of your duty of care has to
cause damage/injury.
In a recent case the third party had already
had his car written off in a previous accident. But he was
still driving it when along came our customer and crashed into
him. Our customer had been negligent and the first 3 of the
above rules were met. But was the damage caused in the crash?
There was certainly damage to the third party car but there was
no loss in value because the car was only worth scrap value to
start with.
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"In an attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a
telephone pole. " |
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Extracts taken from actual claim
forms submitted to
a number of UK car insurance companies |
Next.....
Car Insurance Claims - Apportioning Blame
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