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There has been a lot of media attention about on purpose accidents where certain types of idiots risk both your life and theirs trying to get you to crash into them in such a way that your insurance company pays out because it looks like you are at fault.

Obviously the main thrust of the media’s interest is all about how this is affecting everybody’s ongoing car insurance premiums, but the more human side is very much about the personal tragedies that can occur when things go wrong.

I recently saw a television programme that I occasionally watch called BBC click where they showed that quite a lot of the larger commercial hauliers and blue-chip organisations had started to install front facing cameras with recording facilities built-in to all their vehicles. According to the report, this had saved them huge amounts of yearly insurance premiums but even more importantly proved who is at fault, shortened time in court and ultimately made their drivers safer.

Some of the on-board camera footage included in the report was astounding. At one point a very large articulated lorry was proceeding on the nearside lane of a motorway at least 65 to 70 miles an hour when a beat up old saloon car appeared suddenly from a slip road. When I say appeared suddenly, what I really mean is that it dived in front of the truck with less than 30 cm to spare! This caused the truck to jack-knife and it nearly overturned putting the driver as well as themselves in severe danger. It wasn’t clear that this particular piece of footage was what you would call an on purpose accident, but either way the car driver was a complete idiot all the same.

Obviously for the big companies and road haulage firms, installing such devices is a very sound commercial investment, however for the average car driver this isn’t really an option.

Now a few months ago I was on my way to a morning meeting when a small lump of clay, about the size of a fist fell off the back of a truck. It bounced along the motorway and because it was very busy and there was a 50 mile an hour variable speed limit in place I had absolutely no way of avoiding this debris hitting my car. If I had tried I would have caused a much larger accident and put myself and other road users in danger. I could literally see it coming at me in slow motion and I just knew it would hit my car which it did and scratched the front nearside wing causing about 200 worth of damage.

I did try to follow the truck off the motorway but it suddenly left via one of those works traffic only slip roads and so I was not able to stop the driver and point out what had happened. I’m sure he was blissfully unaware of the fact that he was losing some of the cargo but there was nothing I could do at that point.

This meant that I had to then contact my own insurance company and give them the only information I had which was the registration. Unfortunately it ended up being a long drawn out six month issue because the driver would not accept any responsibility and so in the end I had to take care of the claim and expense myself.

Now the on purpose car accidents and the clay falling off a truck are just two common problems that happen to drivers up and down the country all the time and the downside is that you end up getting penalized by the insurance company even when it was clearly not your fault. You very often have to pay excess fees, many policies don’t offer a free car rental and worst of all your insurance premium goes up because you wind up losing your no claims bonus.

There is however, a remedy which I did not know about until recently which acts as an added insurance to protect against accidents which are not your fault. The way it works is if you are unlucky enough to be in this situation the accident management company will deal with the claim on your behalf and you won’t have to lose any no claims bonus, pay excess fees or be faced with higher future payments. Many accident management companies also offer you a free car rental within twenty four hours and if your car is written off you are allowed to keep using the car rental until your paid out. Each company varies slightly in exactly what they have to offer but the points just mentioned seem to be common benefits to this type of insurance.