So yesterday my husband caused a car accident by rear ending someone, which cause a 4 car rear end accident. Only our car was badly damaged, and everyone else’s just had minor scratches, and no one was injured. I was not in the car.
He was very shaken, which i understand. But i am having trouble emphasizing with him on some things involving the accident. He was found at fault, but he is not accepting any blame for the situation. He claims he did everything right, and the car just didnt stop in time. He claims if he were in his own car, it wouldnt have happened because he doesn’t like how my car breaks (he was driving my car, which has very good breaks imo). When taking driving school he just keeps complaining about how it’s $150 and is taking so long, and i told him hes lucky cause it’s better than a mark on his record, and the ticket would be more expensive. Then he was convinced he could contest the ticket in court by saying he did break in time, and that the car just didn’t actually stop in time. I told him no, it doesn’t matter if you pressed your breaks in time, you still hit them and youre still liable. AND no cop or judge is going to give a lighter punishment for a $150 drivers class for an accident that HE caused.
I just want to be understanding and sympathetic, cause it’s his first accident and I know it’s stressful, and he may have a good point. Maybe he wouldnt have gotten in a wreck if he was driving his car. But I just have a deep irritation when people dont just say “I messed up, i have no excuse and Im sorry.” I just get really annoyed by excuses.
And hes not being rude or anything, hes not yelling or anything. Just not taking full responsibility. He did apologize to me a number of times for wrecking my car though, I just wish he wasn’t making excuses.
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I don’t think you should sympathise with him until he does accept responsibility. He’s in denial about the fact that things could’ve gone terribly and he needs to accept that he didn’t brake in time.
I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not the cars fault. It’s his on every level. If he’s incapable of driving safely in any car but his own, he shouldn’t be driving. He’s so lucky that nobody is injured or badly hurt. He needs to grow up.
You can acknowledge his anxiety and fear and whoever else he’s feeling, but be clear that denial and avoiding blame doesn’t change the fact that he’s at fault and messed up. He’s not a bad person for making a mistake. Often people who have trouble accepting blame act like that because they have such fragile egos that they view any mistakes as something “wrong” with them or a failure in some way. Acknowledge his feelings, but tell him he still has to take responsibility and accept fault
I’m not sure how you need to be sympathizing with him? Is he asking you to?
It seems like he’s just embarrassed and doesn’t want to take responsibility for the accident. Not sure what kind of 29 year-old man thinks it’s excusable to cause an accident, but blame everyone and everything other than himself…
You don’t sympathize or even empathize.
He has an external locus of control vs an internal locus which means that for him, everything is someone else’s fault.
Your car did not fail. Other drivers did not screw up. If you rear end someone it is 100% on you regardless of the condition of the roads, the vehicle, or other drivers’ actions unless you literally lose your brakes.
He wasn’t paying attention to the conditions and perhaps unfamiliar with the vehicle which is still his responsibility. It’s really that simple.
If I had to guess, this delegating of responsibility isn’t isolated to this accident. I’d guess that anything that impacts him negatively is somehow someone else’s fault but his.
A person with a healthy internal locus would take responsibility.
Example: I was in an accident a few weeks ago. I was not at fault per the police. However, I got arrested because in my state, even if you’re below the legal limit for alcohol, if you test above zero, you go to jail, you get an OWI, you have to do classes, you lose your license. And I was.
Had it not been for the yahoos running into me (got t-boned) I would not have even been checked for alcohol. And I didn’t know we had this law—I thought that if you blew under 0.80% you were fine. I was wrong.
I made the decision to drive after having a drink. I was uninformed about the law in this new to me state. And well…here I am dealing with it.
I’m not going to go to the judge and say “you never would have caught me if not for the idiot kid in a big ass truck who slammed into me”
No. It’s “I screwed up and now I know better and I accept my punishment.”
Internal locus.
I’d consider this a red flag and even more so if it’s a common theme.
Uh no he wasn’t paying attention and didn’t brake in time. He isn’t taking responsibility so no he doesn’t deserve empathy
You don’t. You do not need to sympathize about the consequences of his own actions when he is still denying responsibility. The 2 most common answers are slow down or leave move space. A 3rd is to get off the phone.
Some cars do break and accelerate differently, however if he doesn’t like how your car breaks he shouldn’t have driven it.
He should also have said something to you so you could have it looked it if he felt it was an objective liability when it comes to safety.
You can sympathize with him for feeling bad about the accident and damaging your car, and still not accept his BS when it comes to not accepting responsibility.
PS: It doesn’t take long to adjust to a different car, so I’m sure he’s just making excuses. <—Just so everyone understands I know he’s wrong for the excuses.
Different cars brake at different speeds. When I drive my big van, I drive slower, and I give more distance. He is inexperienced and his inability to acknowledge he made a mistake is dangerous. Does he have habit of never accepting he is wrong? I think most people have caused one or two accidents in their life. But we learn and start driving better because of it
As someone who has handled thousands of auto claims, you should not be sympathizing with him. So many times the person who is at fault wants to blame anything else except themself. He does not really have a good point. The VAST majority of accidents that I have handled are due to people not paying attention. Unless you have breaks that basically do not work, his argument is absolute BS.
He is an idiot to think he could contest the ticket by saying he did brake in time, because he did not. Even if someone is driving a car they are not familiar with, they have a duty to make sure they can not hit someone else. If someone is driving a vehicle they normally do not drive, they should be driving MORE cautious.
Do not sympathize with him and I would call him out on his bullshit excuses.
The car didnt stop in time because he was following to closely at too high of a speed, that means he’s a bad driver and its 100% his fault.
No sympathy, bro needs to remove his head from his ass.
So he was following too close? Yeah, he’s going to be deemed at fault.
It’s very rare that he can’t just brake in time (assuming your brake worked properly), he must’ve not been paying attention or/and following too closely possibly not following speed limit.
If he complained that you didn’t empathize enough, tell him the truth, you can’t empathize fully when someone refuses to take ownership of their responsibility. If he has accepted that he did make a mistake, it’s his error and is apologetic, you’ll be more likely to be empathetic.
I’m sorry for your situation. It’s always troublesome when you get into an automobile accident. I’m thankful everyone seems to be fine (physically).
Just because it was his fault doesn’t mean it wasn’t an accident. I think for some people immediately after a stressful situation they tend to deny responsibility until it sinks in. He might still be riding off the anxiety feelings. My husband has crashed 3 cars and totaled one. One of them he was looking out the mirror and the light turned red and he went through it, hitting a car that was turning. He did have some trouble accepting what he did even though it was obviously an at fault accident on his part. I let him vent about it and when the stress and everything faded then we were able to talk about it more of how he was responsible for it, etc.
Braking time is irrelevant because he just didn’t allow enough. If he’d been maintaining the correct required distance behind the car in front this wouldn’t have happened.
So when you say it was a 4 car accident, are you saying he hit the car in front of him so hard that it hit two other cars? Was he distracted? Speeding.
Because if he got hit from behind after the accident, would the fault be shared because the person behind him was following too closely.
I’d be side eyeing him about the accident too. He should be driving MORE carefully if he’s not comfortable in the car. Anyone knows you give yourself a little time to adapt to a car your bit as familiar with.
Perhaps you could tell him that if he accepts responsibility, it will feel better.
Is he trying to make this your fault? (your car = your fault)
I hope not.
He needs to come back to reality and stop saying stuff like a child of a 1 digit age.
He’s 29 and can’t accept responsibility for his actions and blames others ir the car. The car was not at fault. I hope he is not like this blaming others or things in his life. He is 29 and needs to grow up. You can’t do that for him.
Tell your husband it is rarely as easy to accurately assign blame as in a rear-end accident.
Then tell him that trying to shift the blame when he is clearly at fault is really unattractive.
Have him re-read the chapter on how much distance there should be between cars when driving.
Sometimes how much you have to press the brakes ahead of time is different in different cars and maybe he wasn’t used to it but still it’s his fault
Sometimes it’s hard to believe we did something really dumb. Usually just a split second of dumbness is all that is needed to cause a car accident. And then the whole world knows we were dumb – police officers, other involved drivers, insurance, our spouse… It’s humiliating.
He probably feels extra awful because it was your car, and he’d desperately like you to not think he did something dumb. Hopefully when he settles down he’ll accept his blame and deal with the consequences.
OP, you can sympathize by saying, “Yup, it really stinks when we screw up. I know you didn’t mean to, but everyone screws up sometimes. Thankfully no one was hurt. Just take the $150 class, deal with insurance, and fixing/replacing my car, and we’ll move forward.”
As long as he isn’t the kind of person to never take responsibility for his mistakes, he’ll be okay.
But no, he cannot try to claim that it was the car’s fault that it didn’t stop in time. That’s ridiculous.