A few days before the accident, I did something completely unplanned.

On a whim (almost a sixth sense), I took my family to test drive a Kia Carnival. There was no urgency; I was simply thinking it might be time to replace our minivan, our trusty old Honda Odyssey.

The test drive didn’t go as hoped. The family wasn’t impressed. The car didn’t click. So we moved on and I did what I had been hoping to avoid. I went ahead with repairs instead: new tires and a new timing belt. The Odyssey earned another lease on life.

A few days later, my wife was involved in a crash.

She was shaken but physically okay, which mattered most. What she wasn’t was certain. She doesn’t remember every detail of the incident clearly, but she also doesn’t believe she was responsible. That ambiguity stayed with us through everything that followed.

The CHP report: provisional, then final

The California Highway Patrol arrived, documented the scene, spoke to everyone involved, and did their job. The initial report did not assign fault to my wife.

At the time, that felt like closure. It wasn’t.

CHP reports evolve. Officers follow up. They contact all parties involved. They reconcile statements and details after the fact. When the final report came back, fault was assigned to my wife.

That shift mattered, not emotionally, but systemically. Because fault in a police report can ripple outward, especially when insurance companies start making long-term decisions. Premiums don’t respond to how things felt in the moment; they respond to what’s written down at the end.

CHP wasn’t careless or arbitrary. They were precise about their role. But that precision doesn’t always align with how people intuitively understand responsibility.

Talking to the wrong insurance company

Early on, we received calls asking routine questions about the accident. We answered them, assuming this was part of our own insurance process.

It wasn’t.

Only later did I realize we had been speaking to the other party’s insurance adjuster, not ours but the same insurance company. The questions were polite and procedural, but the incentives behind them were very different.

It was a quiet but important lesson: always know whose adjuster you’re talking to.

Towing: authority is explicit

The car was towed, and I assumed that meant it was simply “in the system.”

It wasn’t.

Nothing moved until I physically went to the towing yard to authorize the release—paperwork, identification, signatures. Until that happened, the car was effectively frozen in place, accruing time and potential cost.

Small decisions in the first hour turned out to matter much more than I expected.

Inside insurance: two adjusters, two tracks

One thing I hadn’t appreciated before: there isn’t just one adjuster. • The claim adjuster handles liability and responsibility. • The damage adjuster focuses on valuation and condition.

Those are parallel conversations.

When I spoke with the damage adjuster, details mattered. I had to explicitly explain the brand new tires and the recent timing belt replacement, repairs made just days earlier because we had decided to keep the car.

Those details didn’t change the direction of the outcome, but they improved its accuracy. And accuracy, I learned, is often the most realistic goal.

A quietly absurd realization

Here’s the part that still makes me pause.

The trade-in value we were offered during that unplanned test drive, when we thought we might replace the Odyssey, was almost half of what the insurance company ultimately assessed the car’s value to be.

Same car. Same condition. Two systems. Two very different numbers.

It was unintentionally comical and also revealing.

What stayed with me

No one involved was incompetent or adversarial. CHP officers, towing staff, insurance adjusters, they all operated within clearly defined systems.

The challenge was that those systems don’t explain themselves, especially when you encounter them under stress.

I learned how important it is to understand: • Which reports are provisional and which are final • Who controls which decision • When something becomes irreversible • How today’s paperwork can affect premiums years from now

I wouldn’t recommend learning any of this the hard way. But having gone through it, I now see these systems less emotionally and more structurally.

And I still think about that test drive—how sometimes intuition notices change before logic catches up.

Sometimes, the lesson only becomes clear in hindsight.