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by barbazoo 413 days ago
Driving defensively and slowly is much more skin to having a smoke detector as it actually aims at preventing harm rather than just figuring out who’s at fault.
4 comments

The typical fraud "accident" is a vehicle with 4-5 people (including a child) who slam on their brakes in heavy traffic on the freeway. If that doesn't work, they reverse into you, and then claim whiplash for all the people in the car with a doctor who has everything to gain. It's $50k minimum.

If someone backs into you, or slams on their breaks on the freeway without reason you can drive as defensively as you want and still get unlucky. People can cause "accidents" much more effectively than you can avoid one. Careful motorcyclists know that watching the behavior of all the people around them is critical to survival, but they still get into collisions.

If you do try to drive so "defensively" that you can never get into an accident another person tries to cause, then you end up with 7-10 car lengths of separation, and people will regularly cut you off increasing risks. Please don't be that guy stopped 70ft back from the traffic light and stopping on on-ramps.

Also fun to see dashcam video where someone jumps out in front of the car for the insurance claim, but the driver is too alert and stops before hitting them, only for the person to then throw themselves on the hood of the car while their friend pretends to freak out on the sidewalk and call the cops.
Honestly, car insurance fraud is one of my favorite guilty pleasures on the short-video apps.
Getting falsely accused of hitting someone, being sued, and seeing a huge insurance rate hike doesn't count as harm?
I suppose the broken metaphor would be "I don't deep fry turkeys in my living room and I have smoke detectors."

But what you're saying ignores the fact that you're not the only turkey on the road.

Before I had a dash cam, I had somebody at a stop sign just throw it in reverse and back right into me. I thought I was completely fucked, that they were going to say that I rear-ended them and I would have no recourse.

Luckily for me, they just gassed it and took off. They lost me at a roundabout when I had to wait for a box truck to go by in the night.

I now have a dash cam. No amount of defensive driving would have saved me if they were fraudsters.