It has been nearly a year since a couple filed a claim on their SUV, but their insurer and the vehicle’s manufacturer still cannot seem to agree on who should shoulder the costs of repairing the automobile.
Barb MacNaughton was driving her 2005 Toyota Sequoia along Highway 16 near Radisson, Sask. on January 27, 2016 when she lost control of the vehicle as she tried to pass a semi-trailer.
“I know that I hit the ditch at a huge speed and I spun around and I thought I was gonna tip,” she told
CBC News. “There was a really big bang and I could smell it and my side airbags were right there, within a second.”
Witnesses to the crash fortunately managed to pull her out of the vehicle, which was eventually towed out of the melted snow in the ditch.
The crash resulted in MacNaughton sustaining a concussion and whiplash. Insurer SGI covered for her physiotherapy sessions and took six demerit points from her driver’s licence.
Her husband Neil said that technicians initially estimated the repairs for the SUV’s damaged interior to cost $9,000. He also confirmed that he had signed papers agreeing to write off the vehicle, and that the SUV was towed to a local salvage yard.
By February 19, however, he received a letter from SGI Claims Centre North Battleford manager Randy Daum, notifying Neil that SGI would not pay for any repairs. The insurer explained to him that “damages to your vehicle were the result of a mechanical breakdown.”
“What SGI told me was that if I had one dint the size of my thumb in the side of our vehicle, we would have had insurance. They said one dint. That’s all we needed,” Neil exclaimed. “I didn’t blurt it out loud but if I’d have booted the side of my car after, done. Our vehicle would have been written off.”
“In situations where damage is caused to the interior of a vehicle due to malfunctioning airbags, it would not be covered by insurance because it is considered a mechanical failure,” SGI said in an email.
The car was then transferred to North Battleford’s Toyota dealership, while technicians assessed what happened during the crash.
In a letter addressed to Barb dated July 14, 2016, technicians said that there was no exterior collision damage. Data from the car’s event recorder, however, revealed that “roll angle sensors detected the onset of a rollover and the threshold for deployment was met.”
Neil was told that technicians would plug a device that would conduct analytics on the SUV’s systems, looking for codes to indicate the G-force generated by the crash.
“SGI told me they plugged into it but they wouldn’t tell me what it was,” he explained. “Even our local dealership could not plug into it. Someone from Toyota Canada had to come from Toronto, fly down to North Battleford, plug into it and take a reading, if the airbags deployed too soon.”
A representative of Toyota Canada said that the vehicle’s airbags were definitely activated during the incident, and insists that the MacNaughtons settle the matter of repair costs with their insurer.
“The side curtain airbags in the customer’s vehicle deployed as intended,” Toyota Canada manager of corporate communications Michael Bouliane stated. “This should now be a discussion between the customer and their insurer.”
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