I am afraid you are wrong.
Liability is through negligence. If you were stationary with handbrake on, foot on footbrake and still rear-end the car in front after an impact onto your car, you are simply not negligent.
More likely you would be their witness for a claim from the driver that hit you.
Keep the brakes on. The back's getting hit anyway, might as well save the front (and the complexity of another party involved).
It is a rather annoying situation to find yourself in. Our driver was able to give a countdown of time to impact as the driver behind continued his animated conversation with his passenger until it was too late. He did brake at the very last minute dipping his bonnet which got neatly peeled back to the windscreen. Cars vital fluids all dropped out.
It is really annoying to be a sitting duck at the tail end of a motorway contraflow queue with nowhere to go. We were conveniently in front of the place where the recovery vehicles were parked up!
If you are already stationary then both handbrake and footbrake on to maximum and head back against the headrest. You want to offer as much resistance to forward acceleration as you can muster. It may well destroy the car that impacts behind you but that isn't your problem ;-)
Think of Newton's cradle. In the extreme case of offering no resistance and perfectly elastic collisions you get pummelled again and again as you hit the vehicles on either side of you repeatedly and bounce off.
The other thing to remember is that damage scales as the square of the mass ratio which is why you should never pick a fight with an HGV. A car was made airborne in a recent A19 crash which closed it for half a day.
I had a tiny shunt 3 weeks ago. Stopped at lights and a taxi pulled off a wide pavement (no kerb, it's a waiting bay) and tapped my rear bumper. Cracked it, broke the running light and reverse sensor.
He hadn't any passengers, I got some pics (dashcam wasn't running - passim) exchanged details.
Car was fixed within 10 days. No arguments about liability. I have to grudgingly admit to being impressed. Even more impressive was that he had clearly notified his insurers first, as they tried to arrange all the courtesy car because their insured had admitted liability. Maybe he realised there was no point in arguing. The area itself is covered by CCTV. He wasn't to know my dashcam wasn't running. And being a taxi driver, I presume he has to keep a clean sheet for the LA ?
Isn't it a bit more nuanced that that ? Many years ago my Dad was rear- ended into another car. My Dads insurance paid out to the car in front, but my Dad lost his excess and NCB as the driver of the car that hit him f***ed off. Which made my Dad liable. Despite having handbrake on and footbrake on.
Unfortunately there are/were some agreements between insurance companies that led to this and the consequential loss of NCB.
I suspect the issue was one of proof, and he would have lost his NCB anyway from an insurance claim to repair damage to his rear.
Another suspect statement.
If damage is proportional to energy dissipated, then kinetic energy is 1/2 m v(^2), so proportional to mass but proportional to square of speed.
But I agree with "you should never pick a fight with an HGV".
Whiplash compo claim co's will pester you for years
Back in the day (when cars had real chrome bumpers attached to a chassis, not modern plastic crumple stuff) the theory was that you rolled gently forward until your bumper touched the car in front.
The impact then was transferred through your chassis to the car in front and allegedly you didn't get your front and the back of the other car smashed up - just the back of your car.
Think of the chrome balls toy (Newton's Cradle?), where the first ball hits the row of balls and the one at the other end shoots away with the middle ones not moving.
Thankfully I've never had to try this.
Cheers
Dave R
There is also the height, HGVs tend to go on top of cars and the crush zones don't really work well when there is ten tonne on top of a car.
(I don't think I've seen mention ... ) So that wasn't the vehicle that hit you? (Looked like a recovery truck?) Getting his own business? ;-)
It could be the perspective of the dash cam but it looks like you were sitting quite a bit short of the vehicle in front and it was moving away but you hadn't (nothing wrong with that of course) but what was the size (height) of the vehicle that hit you?
eg. If it was something that could see over your van (a bigger van or truck), could it be that they actually accelerated into you (rather than failed to brake), assuming you would pull away with the other vehicle(s)? Or didn't brake as much for the same reason?
Cheers, T i m
I feel fine today and I have no intentions what so ever of making a claim.
Traffic came to a quickish slow down from about 40 MPH to walking speed.
It was a Golf that hit me.
Piccies of the van.
And that is NOT a plastic bumper that has been shoved in 6 inches.
There is steel under that bumper
Is there any reason why you blanked out part of the registration in the second photo that is visible in the first photo?
I can even see the MOT expires on the 12th June, and that it failed with two major defects this year! What have you been doing in your van to break a spring?
I only got the van 4 weeks ago.
Gold dust or hens teeth?
The £50 dash cam really has been really good in this case.
The dash cam records sound inside the van.
Now I have a Bluetooth Buddy so I can make hands free calls and that uses a loudspeaker inside the van.
Just checked the rest of my dash cam footage after the accident.
About 15 minutes after the accident the other car driver called me and said "sorry it was my fault can we do it without using the insurance I'll pay for it all"
So I have dash cam footage right from the accident up to and including his phone call. The time and date of his phone call is of course logged on my phone.
If you feel fine within days, you are fine. I have genuinely had whiplash and it is bloody painful and restrictive for months.
The first time I was hit, it hurt for a couple of days. The second didn't hurt at all. The third however was bad.
It stopped me sleeping, as it woke me up with the pain every time I moved in my sleep. Just when I thought I was back to normal (three months after) a bit of physical effort (digging an 18" square hole, about 24" deep to access a leaking soil-pipe elbow) triggered it off and I ended up in bed, but awake and exhausted for three days. It took six months before I was back to normal and able to work full hours (including overtime) again!
I did claim for the lost hours of pay - I could show my timesheets from before and after, right up to recovery.
SteveW
The car I saw on the M62 some years ago consisted of an intact car from the front of the car to the B-pillar ... and a tipper truck from the B-pillar backwards! I really hope that there was no-one in the back - most likely not, as it was rush-hour.
SteveW
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