It’s hard enough to find the person who is liable in a single-car accident with two people, and often it requires a police report, an investigation by your personal injury lawyers, and sometimes a large settlement process before fault is declared. If you happen to find yourself in a car accident involving multiple vehicles as a chain reaction, then who deals with that?
In a three-car crash, who pays is a very interesting topic. After all, there are a lot of variables present, especially if you have a pileup of three or more cars. If you were unfortunate enough to be hurt in a car accident like that, you might be wondering who exactly is going to pay your medical bills for that car accident, if they are even paid at all.
Here’s how the process works for a three-car pile-up car accident, and how you deal with getting your medical bills paid.
What is a Chain Reaction Accident?
A chain-reaction car accident is whenever one or two vehicles cause a crash on a busy road or highway. Once the initial car accident occurs, then other drivers who are driving towards the crash might see it and attempt to react so they won’t get involved. Unfortunately, they tend to swerve and either hit other vehicles to add to the chaos of the car accident, or get involved in the car accident themselves and add to the chain reaction.
It is a massive chain reaction car accident that causes a lot of problems and can involve quite a lot of cars considering how they start as a small two vehicles car accident with two drivers. With all the chaos and multiple injuries involved in a chain reaction, the car accident can be a nightmare to manage.
How Is Fault Determined By These Car Accidents?
The fault is divided up like a pie among the various vehicles involved in the car accident, with the blame often determined by the insurance investors. A car driver might be considered 70% at fault when their role in the car accident is broken down, while another car might be at 30% fault for their car accident role. The blame for the car accident can be spread around for multiple drivers or squarely pinned on one driver.
Still, it can be very difficult to determine fault and what vehicle is responsible during these car accidents. The more vehicles that get involved in the chain reaction, the harder that figuring out which of the parties is liable for the collision can be.
What Insurance Do I Need For A Multi Car Accident?
There are a few things that are always common in a multi-car accident, even if the fault of the car accident is always in some sort of flux. First, the damage to the vehicles is much more extensive. Different cars can be hit in the same spot, over and over and over, and that causes much more damage than a simple one-on-one car accident or car crash.
More drivers and passengers have bodily injuries as the cars get hit in the car accident. If you are found at fault for these car accidents, then these injured parties can sue you for the damage caused by your vehicle. You should have a good set of liability coverage for your vehicle and have an umbrella policy as well to cover a chain reaction.
Negligence and Duty Of Care
If the case goes to court, one of the things that each of the attorney-client defenders present are going to do is attempt to prove negligence. Negligence means that you failed to take responsibility for your actions with your vehicle and did not think about how they would harm others. This has a higher risk of placing you at fault for the vehicle accident and is something all personal injury lawyers look for. Especially during your free consultation.
For example, let’s say you are driving your vehicle and run a red light. You know that the rules of the road state that you can’t do this, and it’s against the law and not responsible. If you do it anyway, then you are being willfully negligent and putting others in danger with your vehicle which can cause a car accident. A sure-fire way to risk damaging your vehicle and not being responsible. You could easily cause crashes with your vehicle and possibly strike one in the rear. Then your vehicle would be held liable for the crashes and injures that followed.
Any car crash caused by your reckless behavior with your vehicle would indeed be your fault because anyone can prove negligence based on your actions that were not responsible. You know that running a red light is wrong, but you performed the action anyway and posed a risk to multiple cars. If the other driver was doing something dangerous, such as texting and driving whenever he hit you, then the negligence would fall onto his shoulders because he was not being responsible with his actions.
Every single driver on the road has a ‘duty of care,' which means that you have a responsibility to prevent injuries to the multiple cars on the road by following the rules of the road and driving safely. Negligence is when you as the one driver, ignore the care to those multiple cars and cause both crashes and injuries to other drivers on the road.
If you can prove negligence, you can often claim that that person was also liable for the crashes and could pay compensation for the injuries involved.
What Factors Influence Your Liability?
Of course, some three-car pile-ups aren’t the fault of any one driver but are instead the fault of the environment people were driving on. Weather such as fog or icy roads can contribute to the cause of car accidents, especially if people aren’t used to driving in it. Other poor road conditions such as oil spills or sinkholes might be rare, but they can also happen and cause crashes and injuries.
Aggressive and distracted drivers can also influence who was at fault for the accident as well, and these types of drivers might be the ones who are charged with liability. Drivers who are intoxicated or otherwise impaired are held liable in the exact same way, especially if they rear-end someone and cause injuries. There are several factors that change who is at fault for a car accident, and they can be changed based on the situation. A good lawyer should analyze all of this during the free consultation.
What Do You Do After A Multiple Car Accident?
Unlike a single-vehicle car accident, a multi-car accident is something that can be a hazard even after your role in it has ended. One of the first things that you need to do is to make sure that you and everyone else involved in your car do not have any injuries in any way after you get hit. Make sure you are all safe and then call the police to get them involved in the accident from inside your car. Multiple car crashes can be dangerous and there is the chance of further impacts, so you are required to remain in your car until law enforcement arrives to handle the chain reaction. Stay in the driver's seat and brace yourself for any other problems or injuries as the accident unfolds.
The police should cordon off the area of the car accident and give you the all-clear, and then the officers document what happened during the car accident and should file a report, the police can work with you and your lawyer to present all the facts of the case without any trouble. Insurance companies for each of the drivers involved are also likely to get involved and investigate the accident as well to make a claim for their firm.
No matter what driver is at fault during the accident, you should talk to the police after the crash and after you ensure that you have no bodily injury. Take pictures of the damage to your car the accident caused and also accept medical help if it is offered to you. Refusing medical help and saying that you are okay is the perfect fodder for an insurance company to deny you your claim for the accident.
Although there are several drivers dealing with the accident, try to exchange information with them. Get names, license plate numbers, and insurance information for every driver involved in the accident. The more information that you can receive about the drivers, the better. This can also help you determine fault with the insurance companies. If you know the name of the car in front that caused the initial crash and caused the accident, that can be helpful.
How Are Your Medical Bills Paid?
You’ve just been in a 3 car accident, who pays your medical bills? Always make sure you know how long you should be sore after a car accident so that you know if something is seriously injured. Getting injured is no fun, and you need to completely focus on healing yourself and not worrying about where the money for your bills is going to come from. That's the job of the insurance company and they are going to take the accident from here.
They are going to examine the vehicle types that were involved in. the accident and crash, and figure out what led up to the crash. Did the vehicle damage come from the speed limit, the driver in front of the crash, or the driver behind the accident who caused rear ends to two vehicles nearby?
There are several shared liability laws for multi-car accidents that the insurance company needs to deal with. The first one has to deal with the type of state you are in, with a contributory negligence ruling and a comparative negligence ruling. The first ruling states that if you are even found 1% negligent, you can’t get a claim from anyone, and it is based on the percentage of fault. You are going to pay for all the damages yourself, and are not eligible for any extra payments. This makes being able to determine the percentage of fault very important, especially for the car in front and any cars that might have been causing rear ends.
If you are in a comparative negligence state, then even if you are at fault you can recover from the accident. The amount of money the insurance company pays you from the state depends on the amount of fault you are assigned. You might get less money if you were found to have 75 of the percentage of fault for the accident, vs having 7 of the percentage of fault. Other factors influence this, but the main ruling is the fault of the accident.
Insurance For Drivers
In order to drive, all drivers must have a minimum amount of insurance to drive for both bodily injury and for property damage. In Texas, a driver or drivers need to have $60,000 per accident for bodily injury and $25,000 for property damage, but this number can depend on the state you are in.
In some cases, the driver or drivers who are at fault can run out of insurance money. There’s not a lot of money and the required insurance that is paid out tends to run out rather quickly during multi-car accidents.
If you don’t want to risk running out of money for a multi-car accident, then you need to have some higher-than-average coverage for your vehicle. Any good driver would and should have high liability insurance, and a very high personal injury protection insurance (PIP) to cover potential accidents.
PIP is designed to provide a fixed amount of coverage for your medical bills and lost wages. There’s around $10,000 of medical care protection at the minimum whenever you are involved in a collision and injured. If a driver would be held liable for a collision that money can really help out.
The personal injury protection insurance should also be enough to provide all the coverage you need against any minor scrapes that you received from the crash as the driver, although you can exceed the $10,000 rather quickly if your wounds start to pile up after vehicle-based accidents! Raising your PIP value can help mitigate the costs from the collision a bit.
The PIP benefits are also what pays for most of your health insurance when you get injured in a collision, with your own health insurance companies paying for the rest if coverage exceeds the $10,000 minimum. Always make sure you have the proper health insurance before setting out on the road. It makes everything much easier and can protect you when accidents do happen and everyone needs to determine fault for the accident.
Do I Need A Lawyer For These Car Accidents?
The best way to make sure you know who is at fault for your car accident is to work with an attorney. A personal injury attorney or lawyer from a good law firm is a great idea. During a free consultation, they can help you understand your rights when it comes to your vehicle insurance, help prove negligence from the other parties during the crash and accident, and can help you understand the various intricacies of a multi-car collision since you are a driver. Who pays for your medical bills is determined quickly, so you need a good lawyer to get into your case and determine how you can both be free from fault as a driver and also get a payout from those who were at fault for the vehicle accidents.
If you feel like you need one, then start hiring a lawyer from a law firm, and get them in your corner as quickly as possible. Hiring an attorney as early as possible is something that you need to do, especially if you get badly hurt in the vehicle wreck and the medical bills start piling up! A reputable lawyer is able to estimate the cost of your medical bills while also figuring out who has liability and giving you legal advice on the costs of a trial. They are indispensable and most offer a free consultation to get you started.
Plus, an attorney can take actions on your behalf and even help bring the case to trial in case negotiations fail and you need to fight for your vehicle medical payments in court. They can also be beneficial in your defense in the case someone dies in an accident. Be sure to tell us about your case, and it should all fall under attorney-client privilege.
3 Car Accident, Who Pays?
Finally, our attorney team knows how to get the most from your settlement, and we can help you pay your bills. Whether you take the settlement or we settle out of court, you are going to get your pay for your injuries. Then you can focus on healing yourself back up from your vehicle crashes.
Multi-car collisions are a massive mess even if they involve only three cars, and if you’ve never been in a vehicle accident before, it can be a headache. Make sure to work with our attorneys to figure out who is at fault and we can get you a settlement that should help to ease your pain and suffering from your vehicle crashes.