I’d rather get rear ended than become the rear ender
I was driving on the highway at around 60 mph when the car in front of me suddenly came to a short stop. I slammed the brakes, but there is a limit to how fast a car can come to a full stop, and I ended up rear ending them.
I was actually keeping a safe distance, as can clearly be seen in the dashcam video. It was a bigger distance than 95% of people usually keep on the highway, especially on a highway with a lot of traffic. Thankfully, his car didn’t get damaged, so I didn’t have to deal with that, but my car got significantly damaged. I don’t have collision insurance, so I had to pay out of pocket to fix it.
Here’s what I learned from that experience.
Since legally, being the person who rear ends someone usually makes you automatically at fault, even if realistically there was almost no way to avoid it, you should always brake as hard as necessary and come to a full stop, even if you’re worried about getting rear ended by someone behind you.
(The truth is, it’s not always realistic to keep enough distance to come to a complete stop from highway speed in heavy traffic. If you leave that much space, someone will usually merge into your lane, and then you have to back up even more. So when something suddenly happens in front of you, your best option is still to stop and let the person behind you deal with their own following distance).
Also, front end damage is usually a lot more expensive than rear end damage, because you can damage expensive parts around the engine and other major components.
One more piece of advice from my experience. If you don’t have collision insurance and the other car wasn’t damaged, think very carefully before opening a claim with your insurance. I opened a claim because I thought GEICO would help me, especially since I had the whole thing on camera. Instead, they refused to even try to fight it, and once it was on my history, my insurance price went up.
What do you guys think?