This accident happened in November. Yes, I am extremely thankful that no one was seriously injured because it could have been much different. She is very straight arrow…straight As. Great kid. She went 2 weeks without license. She will pay court cost and fine. We bought her a car and she paid 1/3. . Ill be glad when this is over.
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Filing a civil suit is a normal practice, actually a technicality in many states before the insurance will pay. Almost all the time, especially when there are no injuries involved, the insurance companies settle out of court.
This got a lot of people worked up in the country music world when Barbara Mandrell was hit by an uninsured drunk driver, the DD died at the scene. It got out that she was suing the guy, who had nothing nor did his family. She had to do this to get her uninsured motorist policy to pay, that was a requirement in Tennessee. Her uninsured motorist policy actually sued itself on her behalf, but she got a lot of hate mail over this.
A lot depends on the nature of this civil suit. If the other driver got sucked in by one of those TV lawyers who promises easy money, it could become problematic, but without injuries, the other driver will be pushing the rope uphill trying to get a significant settlement out of this.
BTW, if this is the case, do NOT answer any inquiries from any lawyer or investigator without first contacting your insurance agent. The first thing they look for is how much insurance you have. If they find out you have an umbrella policy, they will go for it. But having that policy means the insurance company will use their better lawyers for you.
I have had them not waive the fine but wave the points it was worth contesting it. The Leo lied and said I passed him at a high rate of speed I might be dumb but I’m not stupid I passed him at 55 but yes I proceeded to speed up and he measured my speed and then pulled me over he saw me coming up on his bumper and slowed down and I made sure I passed him at no more than 55 he told the judge I passed him at a high rate of speed which was an outright lie and I should have told her so but I didn’t want to make the Leo mad.
Who is the judge going to believe? You? Or the officer they see in there all the time?
I made this mistake when I contested a ticket I got for failure to yield to an emergency vehicle. The officer DID NOT have his emergency siren on when he came up behind me, so I had no idea he was there (and neither did the other 5 cars that were in his way.) He felt I was trying to block him in, so I got the ticket. I contested it, and as soon as the officer gave the judge his incorrect testimony saying he had lights and siren on i knew that I was hosed.
and I was.
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I know this is an old topic but maybe we could find out how things went, and it’s a very relevant situation where speeding can be to blame even if the other traffic rules were followed.
It also hit the rear half of the Fiesta, which weighs significantly less than the front. The fact that it spun around 360 degrees shows that the rear of the vehicle took most of the crash energy. So it’s more like a 3800 pound vehicle hitting a 1200 pound vehicle. As the mass difference increases it becomes less significant. The 3800 pound vehicle could weigh 40,000 pounds and the difference would be little. It is an example of the law of diminishing returns. The 3800 pound vehicle could have hit at 35 MPH and slowed down to 28 MPH after the impact. If someone wants to do the math for that please do!
It’s really hard to estimate this kind of thing, but the Fiesta was hit mostly in the cross member that goes under the rear seats, which is the strongest side impact structure in the rear. I’m going to say it was hit between 30 and 40 MPH. The 3300 pound sled that the IIHS crashes in to the side of a car at 31 MPH had a similar amount of intrusion on a 2011 Festa, but that test is done in the center.
The Dodge probably braked before the accident, reducing speed by a rough guess of 10 MPH. This would put their speed in the 40 to 50 MPH range prior to the incident. If this was speeding and it was confirmed and I was the judge, I would rule that the Dodge is 30% at fault. If the vehicle turning left would have been unable to avoid the accident due to excessive speed, then the Dodge would be 100% at fault.
If they were driving too fast for conditions, such as in fog, they could be very well at fault.
Next time make sure you have a dash cam in the car!
If you have a dash cam in your vehicle, you had better be right. It becomes evidence both for you AND the other driver. If the dash cam video shows you even 1% at fault, the other side will use it.
If you decide to erase the video and anyone saw and reported that you had a dash cam video, you can spend time in prison for evidence tampering, even if you were not at fault.
Just curious, has this topic come to a conclusion yet? Has a court heard both sides and made a decision? From what the OP says, seems like there’s some chance OP’s side might be able petition the court to get the officer’s testimony considered inadmissible b/c of the factual errors. Still, the other side will have a chance to testify w/the photographs, so not gonna be a free walk, but fewer penalties maybe.
If you’re a really bad driver having a dashcam is not recommended.
But you have to consider that the other car may have a dashcam, or there could be a witness anyway.
I wonder what happens if you have a cheap dashcam that’s really unreliable?
In what way unreliable? It is foremost a video camera. Secondarily, a GPS speedometer and then maybe a G-meter. The GPS speedo is the one most likely to get you in trouble…
And by the way, It would not have recorded much of anything useful in this crash. As the niece turned, the impact car would go out of the video frame so no useful data could be developed from that.
I could do the math IF I had more data… The energy is 1/2 mass times velocity squared. We’d need to know how far the cars skidded after the impact and in what direction and the type of pavement and their orientation. Bottom line… the faster the impact car was going, the greater the energy imparted to the impacted car received.
In any event… the niece did not assure there was adequate clearance to make the turn and thus it was her fault in the accident no matter how fast the other diver was going as far as the violation is concerned. The civil case is another matter and state laws vary quite a bit on that.
I was thinking in terms of being accused of not recording or erasing the video when it’s really the dashcam that is unreliable or broke so the crash didn’t get recorded.
You have most of the data needed. How elastic the collision was is in question. Car crashes are mostly not elastic (bouncy) at higher speeds. Assume A 3800 pound object traveling at 35 MPH hits a 1200 pound stationary object. It’s over with in a fraction of a second and it’s possible to determine the the speed of the 3800 pound object after the impact.
Elastic means bouncy. If car going 10 MPH with a spring bumper (elastic) rear ends another stationary car that is the same mass, the car in front will speed up to 10 MPH and the car that hit it will now be stopped. If the collision is not elastic, then they’ll both be going 5 MPH after the collision and half the energy will be absorbed by the part of the cars that got smashed.
Because the back of the car is so much lighter than the front, and it got hit right on the transverse cross members which is the strongest place, it’s possible that it was hit at a fairly high speed, possibly over 40 MPH, despite the damage not looking really bad. Don’t forget that the bumper on the other vehicle smashed in a little too.
Easy to determine if erasure happened… the file is “erased” but in computer terms it still exists but is allowed to be overwritten. It is still there and can be recovered. But that is not “reliability”, that is a felony.
How would a dashcam break before the accident? Even if broken after, the file may still be present. And, as I posted, the camera would not record evidence in a side-hit since it is pointed forward, not to the side. That would require a rather fancy 360 degree style of dashcam.
No I don’t. I know both vehicles’ estimated weights and final velocities (zero) but I don’t know how far they traveled after impact, the coefficient of friction of the road surface (asphalt or concrete) nor the rotation of the niece’s car. Elasticity wouldn’t matter in the analysis since all the energy is dissipated by the time each car has stopped. I don’t really care how fast each car is travelling immediately after impact since the point of the analysis is to determine how fast the impacting car was travelling when it hit the other car.
That is wrong. Assuming no brakes are involved, both cars will proceed at 5 mph.
If the cars are inelastic (totally unrealistic), the impacting car will stop and the impacted car will proceed at 10 mph. Think of the steel swinging balls they sell to sit on your desk. Steel is effectively inelastic, the swinging ball stops and the stationary ball swings away.
In any event, irrelevant since this won’t help solve the problem.
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As usual he has all the answers and everyone else is wrong.
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