Here In My Car, or Incidents and Accidents.

Learning to drive is something of a rite of passage, one which many people embark upon at the earliest opportunity. When I was a teenager many of my friends took driving lessons as soon as they were old enough and a great many of them were soon the proud owners of cars; some old, some not so old (none that were new); some in good condition, some in not such good condition. Learning to drive was not on my agenda, however. Perhaps in part this was because my parents did not drive and I was used to getting everywhere by public transport, but also (in an early example of my analysing something to the nth degree and seeing only the negatives) because I could see only the expense and worry attached to learning to drive, buying a car and then maintaining it. Believe it or not, I also worried about the consequences of any collision, accident or crash that may occur, be it my fault or anyone else's.

Years passed in which I relied either on public transport or was given lifts by friends, until I married for the first time in 1990 and June decided that it would be nice if we could share the driving rather than it all fall on her and to that end she bought me some driving lessons as a birthday present. This backed me into a bit of a corner because although I could see the advantages of being able to drive, I did not relish the prospect of actually learning, so we agreed that I would go through with the lessons on the proviso that we told no one that I was taking them until I had taken my test and secondly that if I failed I wouldn't feel obliged to re-take the test. I detested learning to drive; each day, when a lesson was scheduled for the evening, would put me in a foul mood, dreading the prospect of the lesson itself which, when it came, I would enjoy not at all.

Eventually the time came for me to take my test. Wisely, June went out for the day while I paced nervously up and down indoors waiting for two o'clock, the time of the test, to come. Two o'clock finally arrived and after twenty minutes of driving around Hornchurch we pulled up outside the test centre where the examiner asked a few desultory questions on The Highway Code (this being long before the theory test). "Mr Woods," he said, "I am pleased to tell you..." As soon as he said "pleased" I knew that I had passed, which was at once a relief, a surprise and a source of worry, the last because I would now have to drive unsupervised, without an instructor with a foot poised over the dual controls. Having passed I took a lesson in motorway driving, which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone, and then I was on my own (if not accompanied by June), and as one of my instructors had told me, this was when I really started to learn how to drive. Inevitably it was also when I was also most likely to be involved in an accident, although I managed to avoid any incidents or accidents for a couple of years.

The first time I was involved in a road traffic accident was not my fault but my car was a write-off.  The second time I was involved in a road traffic accident was not my fault but my car was a write-off. The third time I was involved in a road traffic accident was not my fault but my car was a write-off.

The first two accidents were fairly mundane; the third one was not. The first time occurred when I was passing through a set of traffic lights and a car coming in the opposite direction, turning right across me, failed to stop to let me pass. Apparently the driver thought that I had jumped the lights and that she had right of way (although even if she believed she had right of way I fail to understand why she completed the manoeuvre when she saw that I wasn't stopping). On the second occasion I was driving quite slowly along a side street when a car reversed off a drive way and straight into me; the result was a caved in wing and broken suspension. In fairness, I had owned the car for nearly thirteen years, but this is the only instance I have ever heard of where a car has reversed into another and written it off.

The third accident, which took place in 2008, was spectacular and when it happened I honestly thought that I was not going to survive it. We were driving to Plymouth to catch a ferry to Santander. We were in good time and rather than use only the motorways, were mixing the journey up and using some motorways and some A roads. We were on a single carriageway stretch of the A35 in Devon, going down a hill. A long line of relatively slow moving traffic was coming in the opposite direction. In the distance, heading towards me in my lane, I could see a fast moving vehicle, which turned out to be a Porsche. At first I thought that it was not going to stop or pull over; I had nowhere to go to avoid a collision, so I slowed down to a crawl. The Porsche pulled over, but was still travelling at high speed. It hit the rear of a Fiat and then time seemed to stand still. I was aware that the Fiat now had all four wheels off the ground and was heading straight for me; I genuinely thought that I was going to die. The Fiat hit my car just about at the point of the door mirror, bounced off and apparently rolled over a number of times, hit the car behind us and came to rest, the right way up, facing in the opposite direction to which it had been travelling.

The point of impact and subsequent trail of damage on my car can be seen clearly here.

 Miraculously, and the police officers who attended the scene were incredulous, no-one was seriously hurt; everyone walked away, although our younger daughter had to go to hospital to a have a small shard of glass removed from her eye. Then the fun began. We were in Exeter, nearly 250 miles from home on a Sunday evening; our luggage was still in the car, which was in another county. When we got home and tried to cook something (we hadn't eaten since breakfast) we found that the cooker had packed up. Having travelled home by train, instead of spending the next week in northern Spain, we spent it at home phoning insurers and arranging to have our luggage recovered. We had to have a bit of a row over the holiday insurance as the insurers could not understand why we had not taken the next ferry, despite the fact that it did not leave for three days and we had no luggage.

 

The Porsche can be seen on the far left of the picture. The Fiat is on the right, where it has come to rest after hitting my car and the Ford immediately behind.

The biggest issue though, was that the driver of the Porsche was uninsured; the insurance details he gave us at the scene were bogus and my insurance company had no luck in tracing him. Recovering the cost of my written off Nissan Note through my insurers was not too difficult, but my uninsured losses (train fares, freight costs to recover our luggage, etc) ran to several hundred pounds and although I managed to get some of it back through the MIB (that's the Motor Insurer's Bureau, not the Men in Black), I still ended up significantly out of pocket.

The MIB, not to be confused with...

...the MIB

Motor insurance is not cheap (especially for young drivers) and many people do not insure their vehicles because of the cost. My advice to you is that if you drive and you are insured, avoid uninsured drivers at all costs; the problem is that sometimes they may not avoid you!