Accident & Injury Law in Texas

Posts Tagged ‘Nationwide’

A criminal flees the police at speeds topping 100 mph, crosses into oncoming traffic and smashes into a car.  Sounds like a nightmare?  It gets worse.  His insurance company doesn’t want to pay up on his $300,000 auto insurance policy.

The Texas Supreme Court will soon decide who deserves the law’s protection – the family whose car was in the wrong place at the wrong time (the 1999 wreck left 7-year old Roney Tanner comatose for a week, in the hospital for a month and in physical therapy for five years) or an insurance company (Nationwide) with a reckless and irresponsible client.

Nationwide has taken the position that the fleeing driver (Richard Gibbons) violated his insurance contract by leading police on a wild chase all but guaranteed to end in a horrific wreck, relying on a starndard “intentional acts exclusion” clause to void coverage – and two courts have agreed with them so far.  Welcome to Texas where the insurance companies rarely pay for their insured’s mistakes.

Nationwide argues that Gibbons ought to have known that disregarding stop signs, traffic signals and lane markings during a protracted high-speed police chase would eventually lead to the type of accident that critically injured Roney Tanner.

But Don Cotton, the Tanners’ lawyer, said the accident was not inevitable. ,
The most dangerous parts of the chase were over by the time Gibbons hit the Tanners on lightly traveled roads surrounded by farmland, he said.

Significantly, Cotton said, pursuing police officers noted that Gibbons slammed on his brakes in an attempt to avoid hitting the Tanners’ 17-yearold Honda Accord with his Ford F-350.

“It is nonsensical to say that somebody intentionally caused harm when the only evidence in the record is that he was trying to avoid causing that harm,” Cotton told the nine justices. “The test is not reckless (acts). The test is ‘intentional.’ ”

If this isn’t a good reason not to carry Nationwide insurance than I don’t know what is.  It’s also all the more reason (as I always say) to carry high uninsured/under-insured coverage.

Several states, including California and New York, have introduced laws against talking on a cell phone while driving, but they still allow the use of hands-free devices, such as Bluetooth headsets.  However, studies have shown that hands-free devices may not help.  It appears that it is the distraction of dialing or talking that is dangerous, rather thean the act of taking a hand off the wheel.

A study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2006 found that dialing or talking on the phone was the cause in 7 percent of crashes and near-crashes.  For the study, drivers had onboard “black boxes” that recorded their actions.

Last year, 41,059 people died in traffic accidents.

Aegis Mobility, a Canadian software company, announced this month that it has developed software called DriveAssist that will detect whether a cell phone is moving at car speeds.  When that happens, the software will alert the cellular network, telling it to hold calls and text messages until he drive is over.

The software doesn’t completely block incoming calls.  Callers will hear a message saying the person they’re calling appears to be driving.  They can hit a button to leave an emergency voice mail, which is put through immediately.

Aegis’ software will work on phones with Windows Mobile software or Symbian software (used in phones from Nokia and Ericsson).  It uses the phone’s global positioning system chip to detect motion, aided by the cell-tower signal.  To work, the software has to be supported by the cellular carrier and can be managed remotely through a web site.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. said it plans to offer a discount of up to 3 to 10 percent on family policies for people who use DriveAssist.