When You Hit An Animal - How Does It Affect Your Car Insurance Rate?
· by Matt Fox · posted April 4, 2008
· filed under Auto, Personal Insurance category.
You’re driving up North to escape our upcoming heat. You have your favorite road music playing on the radio and out from the Pine trees darts a beautiful deer. You react to avoid it but it’s too late. You hit and kill the deer. You’ve probably totaled out your car too. I hope you’re okay. So, how does this scenario affect your rates?
Well, personal car insurance physical damage coverage is broken down into two categories: Collision coverage and Comprehensive coverage (also known as Other Than Collision coverage).
- Collision coverage pays for damages resulting from a collision or upset of your car.
- Comprehensive pays for loss to your car caused other than by collision, including fire, wind, flood, vandalism, theft and ‘acts of God.’
So, good news for you. While hitting a deer is technically an accident, under your auto policy it’s considered an act of God. This means it falls under the Comprehensive coverage and shouldn’t affect your rates.
Now, take that same scenario but instead of hitting the deer, you were able to swerve out of the way and avoid the deer. Good news for the deer. However, you swerved off the road and hit one of the large, beautiful pine trees. Again, I hope you’re okay. How does this affect rates?
This is not good. It is a Collision and would be considered an at-fault accident. Most likely you would be surcharged for the accident.
(I apologize if I offend any animal rights activists out there now. Be angry at the insurance policy language not me, I didn’t write the policy.) If an animal darts out in front of your car and your only options are to hit the animal or hit something else, hit the animal . . . if you want to save your rates.
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