Collisions with animals are covered by the comprehensive portion of your insurance. If you drop collision only your car will still be covered if you hit a deer, racoon, bird, etc… We’ve had the pleasure of all three. Fortunately that type of claim does not generally increase your insurance cost.
Maybe where you live, but the police definitely come where I live.
All I can say is if you are eligible to insure with USAA Insurance, you may find that you can get some real coverage w/o insurance sticking you. Since we have some older/low value vehicles, USAA has a little extra insurance value for replacement if it gets totaled. We haven’t needed to ‘use’ that rider yet, but it seemed like something worthwhile for us. A car ‘worth’ $2,000 but which is running well and you know the vehicle capabilities, you could not replace for $2K.
H is an ‘emerald club’ member with renting vehicles and gets a very good rate.
Here, cops will not come unless a vehicle is blocking traffic and/or it looks like someone could be injured. Other than that… decide on your own. The insurance cos have enough statistics/data to make assumptions of what was more likely to cause an accident. A moving vehicle colliding with a parked one - more likely than not it is the moving vehicle’s driver’s fault. A car rear-ending another one: the second car did not keep sufficient distance. And so on.
I had a woman hit my parked car, and police were not busy in our small town and came out. She denied hitting me, but the police saw clearly she did (I was sitting in my car; she corrected her car, parked and went into the grocery store!) I chased her down; when she denied it, I went and called the police. A few days later, the woman’s told her insurance agent (State Farm) she did do it “she fessed up”. She was older than 70 (maybe even older than 80) and had lost her depth perception; when the police and I saw her drive off, she almost hit a sign…I told her agent she needed to forfeit her license/driving.
Sometimes if you say someone might be injured (which can truly be true). I wish I had done that when my car was rear-ended at Costco gas in the mid-sized city (it was too far away from the pump to get caught on video). However my insurance didn’t penalize me because they knew he lied, other than I did have to pay my deductible. I could have had neck whip-lash; police would have put him at fault! Live an learn - there are a lot of slimy dirt bags out there! This guy was a pathological liar.
If you have a non-involved witness, that really helps with insurance claims. I have been that for two very similar type of collisions (both times, a person missed seeing a red light and crashed into a vehicle with the right of way and the green light at the intersection). People will lie or at least say they don’t really know what happened, but a witness clearly able to spell out what happens weighs heavily!
We never dropped collision. It really doesn’t cost that much and even with our older cars, we would recoup that cost if the car is totaled.
In order to park on campus at the kids’ high school they need to carry comprehensive and collision on their car. I’d check the policy for parking on campus at college if you have a kid there. They are very tough about it here-I had to provide a copy of the insurance showing comp & collision.
The girls also have a dashcam in their car that records for 8 hours when the car is running, then records over it again and again. Came in handy when D16 got in an accident (it was her fault), because she could really see what she did wrong and how close she came to getting killed :(. We made a lot of driving changes after that for her (more education, more practice, limiting when and where she can drive).
In our county the cops come if you call them because of an accident, and in the case above beat us to the scene even though it was only 2 miles from our house.
Can you afford to replace the car? If not, you need collision.
This seems like it could hurt as much as help. If she was the at-fault party in an accident with another vehicle or a pedestrian, I assume the other party could subpoena the dashcam footage.
If they knew about the dashcam, which they didn’t because it’s about the size of a credit card. Plus she was ticketed in the accident, so there’s no doubt who was at fault.
The dash cam has been very helpful, and it’s mounted behind the rear view mirror so they aren’t distracted by it.
We keep collision on our old cars. I guess realistically there is a tipping point if your car isn’t worth much and you would just get rid of it anyway.
We also kept it on old cars, because, at that time, if there were expensive repairs, we didn’t want to deal with the cost or buy new before we were ready . The cars were old enough that keeping it was minimal cost.
A dent is one thing, not drive-able is another. Can you afford 1-2k or more, to make it mobile? And alternate transp while it’s repaired.
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Maybe where you live, but the police definitely come where I live.
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You’re lucky. In many places, the first thing they ask when they’re called is: “is anyone hurt or are cars blocking traffic”. If the answer is “no,” then they don’t come…they just tell you to exchange info and take pics.
Some folks will fib a bit at the injury question and just say something like: "I’m not sure if anyone is seriously hurt,’ just to get them to come out and write down a report.
That said, we had an incident where the officer literally just wrote one vague sentence after hearing from “both sides”. The sentence was sooo vague that the insurance company (both parties) just assigned mutual blame, even tho the other side made an illegal turn!..which wasn’t noted in that measly sentence!!! We didn’t know about the inadequate sentence until a week later when we finally got to see the report!
In some places, police won’t come to a parking lot since it is private property. In some, they only come in case of injury. In some, they will come for anything. There are so many variables.
H and I were in a car accident in a suburb of Milwaukee many years ago with my vehicle (H was BF at the time and driving). Officer did not write up enough detail on the report IMHO, so I called and talked to the person in charge - after I explained what happened (I was a passenger, but the officer on the scene just spoke with the two drivers), my car insurance guy said that the report was amended and the young person who caused the accident received a citation. What she did was through the intersection going the same straight direction as us, tried to skirt around us to our right, and there was a small turn lane into a gas station (that we were turning into) - her car ended up hitting us and ended up in a ditch. IDK if she thought she could hit that little strip and cut it - she was just driving fast and this wasn’t her first accident situation even though she was under 20.
IDK how much things can get looked to after the fact. But I got a citation for getting into a left turn lane too soon, and yet I did so correctly. Had to go to court; the officer advising the DA talked to the DA and she then dropped the charges. But it was the time spent ‘fighting it’ when the officer who pulled me over didn’t even let me say why I was correct - that particular strip of road had heavy abuse of drivers doing the wrong thing and he was a new officer under an edict.