For example, this 100+ vehicle pileup in Texas last year.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/11/fort-worth-highway-pileup-ice/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/11/fort-worth-highway-pileup-ice/)
In: 7
The short answer is that each insurance company pays for their own customers.
In smaller incidents where all damage to all vehicles is very clearly caused only by one person, then that person’s insurance will pay, though for multi vehicle incidents those situations are fairly rare.
If there aren’t clear fault, each victim’s insurance pays for their claim. In fact some states have no-fault insurance rules where this happens even when there are clear at-fault parties and clear victims.
Well, they treat every two cars that bump into each other as a single collision. Which means that most cars are involved in TWO collisions.
One where they have failed to stop in time and bumped into a car in front of them, where they are obviously at fault for that.
And another where someone else has bumped into them, where the other car is obviously at fault.
Sometimes you get a line of events where it’s obvious that one car did in fact not bump into any other car until after it was bumped into from behind, and in that case the third car is considered at fault for the damages to the rear on the first car and the damage to both front and rear on the car in the middle, and their own damages to the front of their own car. But that’s the kind of thing where you typically need a dash cam to properly establish how the few extra seconds played in the favour of one single car owner.
After that, it’s up to the insurance companies to argue over cost estimates and stuff like that, but the interaction between insurance companies is – generally speaking – well established and follows fine tuned praxis, since most insurance companies have daily contact with each other where one or the other has a customer who’s at fault and they has to send out compensation to the other.
The main difference after a huge pileup is that everyone that is doing these type of jobs in the area gets temporarily clogged with work, and it’ll take a while for things to go back to normal again. Waiting times on the phone are going to be ridiculous, to make one thing that is probably expected.
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