My brother was driving a crappy old Vectra as a work car. Driving home one night in heavy rain and heavy traffic, there were a lot of cars that had veered off the road and were filling up the roadside ditch. The traffic was at a standstill.

He stopped about 2 metres behind the car in front and since it didn’t look like it was going anywhere soon, put the car in park and put the handbrake on.

The Probationary driver was looking at all the cars in the ditch and didn’t realise that the traffic had stopped. She hit the Vectra so hard that the boot lid was level with the rear window. The seatbelt pretensioner went off when my brother hit the car in front, she he had accelerated to over 40km/h in the 2 metres. We did the maths later on and she must have been driving at over 100km/h to transfer that much momentum (in an 80 zone, in the rain, approaching an intersection that always had traffic backed up).

Because the Vectra was an old shitbox, the non-working radio fell out, onto the passenger floor and started working again, tuned into a Country & Western station. My brother had whiplash and couldn’t move. When the Paramedics arrived, the first thing he asked them to do was turn off the radio.

In the end, because the car in front and the Probationary driver had the same insurance company, they claimed that all damage to the vehicle in front was my brothers fault for not allowing a large enough gap. They also claimed that since my brother had the park brake on and transmission in Park, he contributed to her not stopping because she didn’t see his brake lights. Because it was a work car with corporate insurance, his employer didn’t fight it and made him pay the excess.