Wow! Good thing you installed those dash cams. Hard to tell, but it looks like she’s looking down when she hits you, probably at her cell phone. I wonder what the real owners story was to their insurance. Did they try to say it was your fault, or did they already know about your cameras?

I had a co-worker almost arrested for something like this. A girl hit him at a light, denied it, and refused to get out of the car. He kept following her and she called 911 saying a guy is chasing her who threatened her, opened the door and tried to pull her out of the car. When they were all pulled over the cops were pretty rough with him and were starting to arrest him when he said he had everything on camera. Despite that, it still took a little bit of convincing to get them to even look at the footage. Things would have ended badly for him without the cams.

I live in Massachusetts. Here, your insurance company information is on file with the Registry of Motor Vehicles. (You can not get plates without it.) As long as you can identify the car, your insurance company can go after theirs for reimbursement.

It is true that people can still let their registration or insurance lapse. Still, it pretty dramatically lowers the rate of dealing with uninsured drivers. (Such as in our neighbor to the both, New Hampshire, whose slogan “Live Free or Die” seeme to include the option to risk hurting others without appropriate precautions. We M*******s have learned keep a cautious eye on old vehicles with NH plates!)

Now back to our mutton: I recently installed a WayLens Secure 360 dash cam in my MINI. It is a near field device, meant more for recording activity around a car than on the road, but it is also appropriate for sideswipe situations like yours. It also uses Doppler radar to detect motion when parked, and can run that way for a couple weeks before it shuts down to prevent draining a car battery too much. Generally smart design.

The Secure 360 works by using a super fisheye lens pointed straight up, and a square sensor. The onboard hardware does polar to Cartesian mapping to turn it into an HD widescreen image split into two halves, front and back. There is some quality loss in the conversion compared to a conventional camera but it’s still quite good. Having a single device capture all directions is kinda great.




it also does a neat trick using its phone app. When playing back video, you can switch from the stacked 360 coverage to a full screen single direction image which you can drag with your finger to look around the 360 hemisphere! It’s freaking cool. Sort of like digital zoom for any direction you want.

The one drawback is in the nature of modern car design: very limited rear coverage due to the tiny freaking rear windows that have been in vogue for the past decade or so. The rear hatch really takes a bite out of the image. :( I’m thinking about moving my old dash cam to the rear to provide some extra coverage.

In any case my first few weeks with this product have been great. I’ve ordered a second for my spouse’s Countryman, which has had two parking lot incidents in the past two years at our local supermarket. One was hit and run, unattended, with no evidence; we ate the deductible and rate hike for $2000 of body work. Then again this year, but she was rear ended for the sin of stopping for a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Over $2500 there, but the other guy’s insurance covered it.

Next time some random jerk does a hit and run in the parking lot, I’m going to give the insurance company enough information to chase them down and screw their rates instead of mine

if you are going after someone else’s insurance you can and should claim EVERYTHING that was damaged.

Your comprehensive policy may exclude such things if you claim against your own. That exclusion doesn’t apply to other people when you make a claim against them. Their insurance company will be delighted if you don’t claim all your damages though

that said, from the photo that looks like a scratch, not a crack. But ask a mechanic with some experience with wheels for their evaluation. Us people on the internet are notoriously unreliable

i took ignition switched power from the line leading to the cigarette lighter from the fuse box; always on from the master hot input to the fuse box using a ring connector; and ground to a factory ground point under the passenger side floor sill trim panel.

F-series trim is a dream to work with compared to R-series. So much easier to pull and replace trim panels! Many fewer fasteners, just more clips, and it makes a big difference!