‘Blame game’ not best policy for fender benders

The air bag: The etiquette of accidents and insurance claims in the UAE is a muddy area, writes Fraser Martin.

Underhand motorists lurk, even at the car wash. Razan Alzayani / The National

A few years ago I had a pal who was not the most attentive driver in the world. He was constantly in hot water with his boss for one minor scrape or another on the company car. I don’t think he was actually that bad a driver – when there was no one else around he was fine – but his ability to evaluate space was sadly lacking. His car was covered in nicks and scratches, and while he kept the inside clean and neat the outside of the car always looked as if it had just been to battle.

The final straw would have been the dent in the back bumper; he managed to reverse the car into one of Dubai Municipality’s lovely concrete dividers in a car park, and successfully reshaped the rear. Clearly this was not going to be one to hide easily.

However, in a brainwave well beyond his general level of concentration, he remembered that no one really stops at pedestrian crossings in this country and so a plan was hatched to stop relatively suddenly, to allow someone at a crossing to cross, in the secure knowledge that sooner or later someone else would run into the back of his car. It took 18 hours. The car was going to be repaired on the insurance anyway, and whoever was driving too close deserved all they got. “Someone ran into me at a pedestrian crossing, boss”. Problem solved.

Here’s another trick I recently became aware of. A car pulls into the car wash to have the usual service done; attendants, under pressure to get through the jobs before the forecourt is blocked beyond all possible use, filter the car in towards the bays and get to work. A damaged part is discovered on the car halfway through the cleaning process and is taped up to prevent loss. The car is cleaned and heads to the drying area whereupon the owner “spots” the damaged part and calls the police, who are kind enough not to broach any discussion as to who might be responsible. The car wash attendant is fined the cost of the replacement part (about one third of his monthly salary) and the customer goes happily on their way. Problem solved again.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not entirely convinced there are many parallels here. On the one hand, an insurance company is going to foot the bill for something that would have come to them anyway, whereas on the other hand, it appears that some damage to a vehicle part is being covered up, with the resultant solution coming out of the pocket of someone who can ill afford to pay for it, never mind even dream of owning a car. I can understand the first scenario – the second one makes my blood boil.

Accidents do happen, and cars are pieces of machinery. Things do go wrong and we enter into a sort of unwritten understanding that at some point in the whole relationship we are going to be just a little bit unhappy. Should there be someone to blame, even if it is just a failure of an old part? Should someone else have to pay for any inconvenience? Perhaps in America, the most litigious country in the world, but here in the UAE where solutions are invariably instant and general incomes are high? I don’t think so.

What I am sure of, though, is that blaming a low-paid worker to keep yourself “in pocket” by putting them “out of pocket” is a pretty poor advertisement for any country. Whether the car wash guy got a receipt for the spare part or whether he had the deduction made by the company is not known. Either way, he is the only one who loses, and is the one who can least afford the loss.

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