Bedford Driving Lessons

We are in the middle of a compensation epidemic, with whiplash accounting for 76 per cent of all car-accident insurance claims. Could a whiplash ‘lie detector’ be the solution? ‘I just cannot believe that a bump at snail’s pace could have caused an injury like that,” says Claire Coleman, a motorist who earlier this year accidentally shunted the car in front while in traffic near her south London home. The driver of the Vauxhall Zafira got out, saw there was no damage and drove off. Claire assumed that would be the end of it, but was astonished to find out a couple of months later that the driver had claimed for a whiplash injury, and won more than £2,000. “There was absolutely no visible damage to either car – not even a scratch or a tiny dent,” she says. As Claire discovered, we are in the middle of a whiplash epidemic. Compensation claims for the neck injury now stand at three quarters of all personal injury claims as a result of a car accident. And the insurance industry is convinced that many are fraudulent. “Seventy-six per cent is twice the average for other European countries,” says a spokesman for the Association of British Insurers (ABI). “It’s unlikely we’ve got some of the weakest necks in Europe.” This compensation cash machine is having a disastrous effect on our insurance premiums: according to the AA, in the first four months this year they shot up by a record 40 per cent. But now the insurance industry is fighting back with what has been privately dubbed the whiplash lie detector test. It doesn’t measure heart rate, blood pressure or skin moisture, but instead is a sophisticated piece of software into which you feed details of the accident. So in goes the speed of the crash, the weight of the cars, the visible damage and lastly the type of cars. The so-called WITkit (for Whiplash Injury Toolkit) then gives you a probability that the person claiming whiplash injury is telling porkies.  More