The Assessor
Our regular column by a motor insurance claims assessor. No matter what he does, he gets stomped on by either his boss or the repairers. These are his stories.
When I receive instructions from an insurance company to assess without prejudice and to urgently submit all the paperwork to the claims department, I know I’m in for something uncanny. And so it was when I had to assess damage to the floorpan, rail and sill caused by the car’s owner not using his new car’s jack correctly.
Despite the fact that he hadn’t even looked at his car’s owner manual, the owner was full of excuses and out to blame anyone but himself. According to him it was all the bloody jack’s fault even though he’d had three goes at trying to lift the car!
After this experience I think that he wanted to influence future car design. He believed that all car jacks should be identical and their operation should be standardised regardless of brand or model of car.
He also thought that chocks for the wheels to prevent rolling should be supplied with every jack. To cap it off, he thought it would be a good idea to have a law passed for all new cars to have brightly coloured stickers attached to their sills clearly showing the jacking points. Now that would be a good look – integrated sill skirts with flouro arrows plastered on them!
Anyhow, the owner asserted that the whole episode with his car was an accident. If he wasn’t going to get satisfaction from his insurance company he was going to sue them and the car’s manufacturer. These weren’t hollow words either as he had in his possession a report from the National Coroners Information System to back his case.
This report indicated that the car jack has become one of the most dangerous products on the market. The coroner’s figures showed that between 2000 and 2007, 81 deaths in Australia were linked to broken, faulty or mishandled products.
Of those, 29 were due to wrongly used jacks, which were all due to misuse. Some victims used them to work under their cars and some chose jacks that were too flimsy for their vehicle. Written warnings printed on the jacks were largely ignored.
In some cases, car jacks were used to work under trucks, boats or caravans. Others were not secured against rolling whilst another fell off wooden blocks. The vehicles fell or rolled, crushing or suffocating the victims. All were men, aged between 30 and 60, and most were working at home.
I warned the insurance company management of what was potentially coming with that claim and left it with them and their legal team to sort out. This whole escapade also had me thinking how car design and features are influenced by fear – fear of being sued!
It’s got to be some sort of cruel joke that a legal system, in particular America’s, entertains a person who has driven through their own lounge room in a fit of abject stupidity and turns around to sue the car’s manufacturer for not making the vehicle fool-proof.
Drive any car destined for the American market and be bewildered by the array of safety stickers, warning bells and the brake-gearshift interlock. It would’ve taken only one dimwit to have wiped out their own garage in LA to have gotten the legal ball rolling across the rest of the country for a class action against a car maker.
Likewise, those annoying warning chimes and buzzers are not necessarily there to protect the driver or passengers, but to protect car-makers from litigation when an unfortunate citizen drove into a pole without their seat belt on because the car didn’t remind them to buckle up.
This abdication of personal responsibility and the reliance on the vehicle to do the thinking, I believe is only going to get worse. Those of you in the trade working on European cars in particular will have already seen new models fitted with features such as crash avoidance radar, blind-spot alert and even park assist systems where the car actually manoeuvres itself into a parking space for you.
Road safety experts are divided on the merits of such features. Whilst most agree that they could make a vehicle safer to drive, many believe that some of them actually do more harm than good by numbing the driving experience and leaving drivers with a false sense of security.
So here are some questions to ponder!
Knowing that a percentage of the population probably can’t even use a car jack safely, how confidence-inspiring is it then for all road users that the driver near them is intelligent enough to actually set up and is using their car’s technology correctly as specified by the car’s manufacturer?
Because no technology is totally reliable, especially as it ages or if it has been poorly re-installed after a repair, who or what is to blame for the ensuing crash should one of these systems fail to operate? In the meantime, when someone sets about showing off their new car that practically thinks and drives itself, I’ll just ask them why they just don’t use a train instead.