My Jeep Compass 4x4 at 1.65L Km : Had an accident & subsequent repairs

Thankfully we all were safe and no one was injured including the other car members (XL6) and the biker who was involved in this accident.

BHPian arun_josie recently shared this with other enthusiasts:

An unfortunate accident near Dindigul (On the way to Munnar) on Dec 2024:

Driving on our roads always comes with a risk of an accident no matter how careful you are, and no one wants to be on the bad end of an accident. But Scarlett met with an accident on December 25th while I was driving with my family towards Munnar, the accident happened near Dindigul (TN). Thankfully we all were safe and no one was injured including the other car members (XL6) and the biker who was involved in this accident.

A drive to Munnar was pending for ages and so I was looking forward to this drive. Our destination was 540 Kms from Bangalore and so we made an early morning start. One of my friends and his family were coming with us in their Seltos. As planned, we started by 4am. The traffic was not bad, but a bunch of cars were always around, it was probably the vacation crowd. We maintained speeds in the range of 80-90kmph and occasionally I was touching 100kmph. We stopped for breakfast at A2B (the one after Salem towards Namakkal) around 7:45am. This was a longer stop as the hotel was crowded.

ODO crossed 1,65,000 Km just after the breakfast stop

After we resumed, I continued with the same speed range and when we were getting closer to Dindigul, there was a XL6 little ahead of me on the right lane and I was on the left lane with no vehicles ahead of me. At this point, we both were approaching an intersection and a two-wheeler guy (75 year old man on a TVS 50 with an old lady in the pillion) who was waiting at the intersection to enter the road decides to cross . XL6 driver didn’t expect this move and to avoid the biker he quickly moved to the left lane but the two-wheeler guy just continued to cross the road which made the XL6 guy to brake hard. Thankfully, he was able to stop but still hit(mild impact) the two-wheeler.

Even as this was unfolding in front of me, I didn’t panic as I was sure that I will be able to brake and stop. However, when I applied the brake, I felt something unusual and knew that it won’t stop in time. The ABS kicked in, but the speed reduction was not as expected. Now with XL6 completely blocking my lane, I thought to go off the road but immediately realized that there was a deep ditch right off the shoulder of the road. So, I had to steer (thanks to ABS) back towards the XL6 and hit the left rear. All this happened in split seconds.

During the contact, we didn’t feel anything more than a slight nudge inside the cabin. But the TPMS triggered an alert almost immediately indicating a flat front right tyre and when I got out to check the damage, I realized that the damages were more than what I thought. I expected a flat tyre and a dented bumper at most. But what I saw was a caved in wheel arch along with the flat tyre. It could be probably because the XL6 guy was holding the brakes during the impact. Also, he had a bull bar.

Initial observation:

I checked the two-wheeler first and he was fine. The passengers in the XL6 were fine too.

I was clueless on why I couldn’t stop as expected. One reason could be that there was water spilled on this intersection on the left lane. Probably some water tanker had just crossed this location a few minutes before. My braking point was right on this water part and the water was spread across a few meters. The AT tyres just couldn’t take this despite decent tread depth and ended up with increased braking distance.

Also, there was no damage on the right-side tyre but the alloys had cracked. This was strange as the impact was not on any sharp object.I checked the underbody and couldn’t see any leakages.

The crack on the alloy

There is no video clip because, few days before this trip, I changed the dashcam to 70mai. After changing the dashcam I was still using the old SD card as I was able to view the dashcam videos from mobile app then. I didn’t try to download these videos and test. Now when I downloaded the videos, they play but the video is not available. However I was able to view the clippings in the emergency directory via the mobile app. It had just the last 4-5 seconds before the impact. But again, once I move the file to laptop or upload to youtube, it doesn’t play. This is probably because the old SD card is not compatible with the 70mai dashcam. I have put the supported one now after this accident.

Negotiation:

The XL6 guy and the 2-wheeler guys were locals and they were having a heated argument between them as the two wheeler guy blamed the XL6 for not letting him cross the road. His argument was that he already waited for 5 minutes patiently and then decided to cross the road.

In a few minutes the police and one local political party guy came to the scene. After some discussion which took some time, I agreed to pay some compensation amount to the XL6 guy.

Towed my Jeep to Madurai:

The nearest Jeep authorized service center is in Madurai. So, I spoke to the ARAS Madurai Jeep service center manager and told him about this accident and the visual damages. He clearly instructed me not to drive as it may lead to insurance issues later. Especially if the damage gets aggravated during the drive then insurance can reject the claim. So, they sent a flat-bed tow truck to tow my Jeep to the Madurai service center. This is around 70Km from the accident location.

It took around two hours for the flat-bed tow truck to arrive at our location. During these two hours, we decided to continue our trip in a taxi as we had the rooms already booked for our trip. One of my known travel agent from Kanyakumari helped me to arrange a Dzire taxi from Dindigul.

Once the flat-bed arrived, we loaded the Scarlett on it and I accompanied the driver in the tow truck. It took us one and a half hour to reach the service center.

Good Samaritan at the accident spot - Local Mechanic:

When I started to remove the tyre to replace it with the stepney, one mechanic who was crossing that spot came to us and volunteered to replace the tyre. Even though I was fine with doing this task, he still showed intention to help me. So, I moved away to let him replace the tyre and went to resume my discussion with the other parties. There were some heated negotiations, and it took a while to come to a compromise. When that finished, I looked for the mechanic to thank him, but he had left by then. Initially I thought he might demand money for this but later I understood that his intention was just to help and didn’t expect anything from us. It’s very rare to see such people during times of crisis.

Initiating the insurance process (Future Generali):

Thanks to the manager Bala at the Jeep service center, the technicians quickly checked the extent of damages and confirmed that there are damages to the suspension, link rod, steering rack etc. So, I did the documentation work for the insurance (filling the required forms and writing a letter describing the accident) and also handed over the Original copy of the RC and my driving license.

Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.