What to Do When Your Car Is Towed After a Serious Crash
After a serious collision, the damaged vehicle can become an afterthought.
The injured person may be at the hospital. Family members are trying to figure out what happened. Insurance companies are calling. Transportation suddenly becomes a problem. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, the vehicle may be sitting in a tow yard accumulating storage charges.
There is another reason to locate that vehicle promptly.
The vehicle itself may still tell us something about the collision.
Not every damaged car needs to sit untouched for months. But before it is repaired, transferred, or disposed of, someone should consider whether it needs to be inspected.
First find the vehicle
After a serious crash, determine where the vehicle was taken.
That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy for this information to get lost when someone leaves the scene by ambulance.
The vehicle may have been taken to a municipal lot, a private towing company, a repair facility, an insurer's facility, or somewhere else entirely.
Start with the basic information:
- Where is the vehicle?
- Who has possession of it?
- What is its current condition?
- Has an insurance company inspected it?
- Has anyone authorized repairs or disposal?
- Are personal belongings still inside?
Those questions become more important when the collision involves a serious injury.
The vehicle can matter beyond the property claim
If a car is obviously totaled, the natural reaction is: Get the property claim resolved and move on.
Sometimes that is perfectly appropriate.
Before a seriously damaged vehicle disappears, determine whether it should first be documented or inspected.
Imagine a side-impact collision where the parties disagree about the angle of impact.
The crush pattern, damaged components, photographs, or information associated with the vehicle may become relevant to understanding what happened.
The vehicle may not prove either side's version of events on its own. But once it has been destroyed, an inspection may no longer be possible.
Retrieving belongings from the car
This is another practical issue people forget.
Medication. Children's car seats. Work equipment. Eyeglasses. A laptop. Identification. Personal documents.
If you need property from the vehicle, contact the facility and determine what is required to retrieve it.
But if something inside the vehicle may itself be relevant to the collision, do not alter or discard it simply because you want to clean everything out.
You do not need to become an evidence technician. The goal is to avoid an irreversible decision while everyone is still operating in crisis mode.
Managing storage charges
Tow-yard and storage charges can add up quickly.
Contact the property insurer promptly to find out whether an inspection has occurred and what needs to happen next.
Preserving a vehicle does not mean allowing storage charges to grow indefinitely without a plan.
Coordinate the next steps. If the vehicle needs to be inspected, arrange for that to happen. If it does not, move the property claim forward.
The worst outcome is substantial storage charges with no preservation plan at all.
Before signing the vehicle over Understand what you are signing.
A routine property-damage transaction and a serious bodily-injury case are not necessarily the same thing.
Before transferring title, authorizing destruction, or signing paperwork that gives someone control over the vehicle, ask whether anyone still has a legitimate reason to inspect it.
The answer may be no, but that decision should be made intentionally.
A practical question to ask early
After a serious collision, people understandably focus on the injuries. Meanwhile, the vehicle is sitting somewhere.
When I become involved early, I ask:
Where is the car, and do we need anything from it before it is gone?
That question takes a few minutes to ask. It can be impossible to answer after the vehicle has already been destroyed.
If you or a family member has been seriously injured in an Illinois crash and the vehicle has been towed, Duran Law Offices can help determine what needs immediate attention. Call 312-300-0473. From our Chicago office, we represent seriously injured people across Illinois.