Freeway crash, a wheel torn off, and no airbag deployment

Attorney Answer

You are asking at the right moment, because almost everything that decides a claim like this is decided in the first couple of weeks — and one of the things you have mentioned in passing may matter more than you realize.

Take the concussion seriously, and not only medically. "Mild" is a clinical grading of the injury, not a prediction about your recovery. Headaches, difficulty concentrating, memory trouble, light sensitivity, irritability and sleep disturbance are ordinary after a head injury and frequently show up days later. They are also the symptoms claimants most often fail to report, because they do not connect them to the crash. If you do not report them, they are not in the record, and a symptom that is not in the record did not happen as far as an insurer is concerned.

The force involved is worth documenting. A wheel torn off and a vehicle sent spinning describes a substantial impact, and photographs of that damage do real work later — they answer the argument that a concussion could not have come from a minor collision.

Now the airbags, which is the part you mentioned almost in passing. Airbags not deploying in an impact severe enough to tear a wheel off is worth someone looking at properly. It may have an innocent explanation: deployment depends on the direction and nature of the impact, and a side or oblique strike does not necessarily trigger a frontal airbag. But where a restraint system should have operated and did not, that is a question about the vehicle rather than about the other driver, and it is a different kind of claim against a different party.

This is not something to assess yourself, and there is one thing that will decide whether it can ever be assessed at all: do not let the car be repaired, sold, scrapped or released to anyone before it has been examined. Once the vehicle is gone the question can never be answered. Insurers dispose of total-loss vehicles quickly and routinely, and that is the ordinary way this possibility is lost.

Alabama is one of a handful of states that still applies contributory negligence, and it changes everything about a claim here. If the person claiming is found to have been negligent themselves, and that negligence helped cause the injury, they recover nothing — not a reduced amount, nothing. There is no apportionment and no percentage.

Two things soften that, and both matter.

It is a defense the other side has to prove. Contributory negligence is an affirmative defense, so the burden is on the defendant to establish it rather than on the claimant to disprove it. And it is not established simply by showing carelessness: the defendant generally has to show the claimant knew of the danger, appreciated it, and failed to take reasonable care anyway. Alabama's courts have said that simple heedlessness is not enough, and that it is normally a question for a jury rather than something decided as a matter of law.

And it is no defense at all to wanton conduct. Where the other party's behavior goes beyond ordinary negligence to wantonness, contributory negligence does not bar the claim. That makes how the other driver's conduct is characterized one of the most consequential questions in an Alabama case.

So say less than feels natural to the other insurer, particularly about your speed, your lane and what you saw. In Alabama that conversation is not a formality.

What you can do

1. Collect the police report as soon as it is available and read it. If its account is wrong, correcting it is far easier now. 2. Tell your doctor about every symptom, including headaches, concentration, memory, mood and sleep. A symptom you do not report is a symptom that did not exist, as far as the claim is concerned. 3. Photograph the vehicle thoroughly before it goes anywhere — all angles, the missing wheel, the interior and the undeployed airbag covers. 4. Tell your insurer in writing that the vehicle must not be repaired, sold, scrapped or released pending inspection, and say the airbags did not deploy. Do this now, not after the valuation. 5. Ask in writing for any camera footage of that stretch of freeway and identify witnesses. Both disappear within days. 6. Keep every medical record and follow the treatment plan without gaps. 7. Do not give the other driver's insurer a recorded statement before taking advice. 8. Speak to an Alabama attorney soon, and raise the airbags specifically. Whether that is worth investigating is a decision that has to be made while the car still exists.

⏱ Time limits apply. Ala. Code § 6-2-38(l) gives two years: “all actions for any injury to the person or rights of another not arising from contract and not specifically enumerated in this section must be brought within two years.” Evidence goes sooner — footage is overwritten and memories fade — so the practical deadline is usually much earlier than the legal one.

An Alabama attorney can tell you quickly how the facts here line up, and most will look at a matter like this at no cost.