If you have been reading my blog you will know back in September I was involved in a car accident that shunted my car into a dual carriageway. Writing my car off and landing me with nearly 3 months of weekly physio sessions for pain and damage to my back and neck.
This festive period it has been a fairly low-key kind of year with pain still present from September. However one of my Christmas outings was with my lovely friend Lindsey on the 27th for some shopping and then hitting the pictures to watch a film.
After dropping Linz home I stopped off to fill up the car with diesel and then set off on my usual route home.
We live in Nottinghamshire and so our roads can be fairly rural and my route home was no exception.
After nearly 20 years of driving experience and some well placed road signs to follow, my route home is very clearly one that your speeds and driving is dictated on by the weather with tight bends and road liable to icing signs I knew that black ice was probably going to be present I followed the highway code and I slowed right down, used higher gears and braked gently for corners.
After arriving at a cross roads that intercepts a busy A road I was waiting to cross and turn right when I was hit from behind.
Honest to god you could not make this up.
Now when I went round the last almost 90 degree bend the lights from the car behind were so far in the distance that there was no way that car should have been behind me so quickly on an icy road if they had reduced their speed to accommodate for the black ice and minus temperatures, along with the rain that had blighted us for the last few days.
Obviously she had not decreased her speed and had put her brakes on and in those conditions it can take over 10 times the normal distance to stop, never mind the ice. She slid on the black ice right into the back of my new car.
I had only had my new (to me) car 12 weeks.
We decided to pull over the main road onto the opposite side of the crossroads where there were space to pull in out-of-the-way.
When we pulled up the gritter was just pulling up to the junction we had just left and inside I cried.
The girl in the car that hit me was accompanied and she told me she had been chatting to her friends and so hadn’t seen me brake. However with all my brake lights working correctly I can only assume she was too engrossed in her conversation to be taking due care and attention of the road conditions.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t wish any ill harm to this young lady but by god am I frustrated that no matter how carefully I drove it really is true you are reliant on others doing the same and it’s not always the case that they do.
Now I know the young lady tried to point out there was no damage but I know newer cars are no longer designed to stand up to impacts. They are effectively designed to crumple and protect in a cocoon its occupants. I also know that my previous car had taken more damage underneath than I was aware off so had no choice but to go through my car insurance who requested for my car to be checked over.
Tesco car insurance have been mind blowingly fantastic previously and again this time. After phoning and getting straight through to an advisor (even at 9pm at night) they organised for the garage to contact me the next morning to sort out collection and the hire car company to get me a car of similar spec as mine the following day too.
True to their word both the hire car company and the garage both called before 11am them the next morning, helping me get back on the road.
I am not going to lie, however easy Tesco have made it, there is nothing like the stress levels on waiting around to see how my car will fair after the black ice collision.
I guess it was easier for the other driver shrug off in a leased company car, as she was fairly blasé about it all however I have just finished making my last loan payment on my car after taking a short-term loan while waiting for my invoices to be paid and using every spare penny we had to get it.
I am devastated.
There is scuffing to the bumper that we can see and the truck driver that collected my car to take back to the garage pointed out several other issues like the gaps between the back bumper and boot door that is out of line too.
However now its just a waiting game to find out the full list of repairs and a return date for it to come home once fixed.
Although I have a lovely hire car to drive it’s not the same as your own car is it?
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