So basically, I rear ended another driver couple weeks ago (3 week) and got serious damage on my car. The other driver had a larger jeep so little to no damage was made on his. I was scared and really didn’t know what to do, I asked if he wanted to call the police or trade information, but he said it was okay and left immediately afterwards. I did leave the scene a little after because of traffic. Talked to people and they said to just leave it alone and just pay it out of pocket, however I’m realizing the extent of the incident probably damaged the interior as well and I most likely won’t be able to pay out of pocket.
I know my premium will go up and I’m okay with it because of the damage, I just don’t know if I’ll be covered because of how long I waited and also not filing a report.
FYI- I live in South Dakota and read somewhere that accidents can be filed in 3-5 years. I also have collision coverage on my policy.
Posted by OneCute9186
2 Comments
It’s most likely written directly into your policy that you must report an accident within a “reasonable amount of time” aka the longer you wait, the harder it will be to prove damage relates to a particular accident, plus you risk more damage happening to your car and making it even harder to prove.
The proof of the cause of damage will be on you. Hopefully you have pictures and it might not be a bad idea to try to file a police report.
You have however long your policy says you do to file a claim. Some policies have no time limit. The shortest time limit I’ve ever seen in a policy is 180 days, so I imagine you’re fine.
Lots of people don’t file claims for some time after an accident. I wrote-up 12 collisions today. More than one of them were over a month old for one reason or another. I just took my elderly mother’s car away from her and I’m filing a collision claim on it next week for an accident that happened eight or nine months ago.
It’s no big deal unless the delay caused the claim to become materially more expensive to handle for some reason, due to the delay. It’s hard to even think of a situation that would cause that. Maybe you had a convertible and somebody slashed the top and you waited for months to report/claim it and in the meanwhile rainstorms let a lot of water into your car. I’d pay for the slashed top but you might be SOL on the water damage. Something like that. There’s no collision damage that’s going to cost materially more to fix today than it did three weeks ago, so you’re probably fine.