What to Do After a Motorway Accident: The First Hour

If anyone is injured, if any vehicle has stopped in a live lane, or if you are on a smart motorway with no hard shoulder to reach, call 999 straight away. Those three situations are emergencies, and the emergency services would far rather attend a near miss than a second collision. For everything else, the priority is still distance from moving traffic: steer left onto the hard shoulder or into an emergency refuge area if the vehicle will still move, switch on your hazard lights, and leave the vehicle through the doors on the left-hand side, away from the carriageway.

Get everyone up the bank or behind the safety barrier and keep passengers together, upstream of the vehicles so that debris or a secondary impact cannot reach you. Do not stand between the vehicles, behind them, or on the traffic side to inspect the damage. If you cannot get out safely, stay in the vehicle with your seatbelt fastened and call 999 from inside. On smart motorway sections, overhead signals showing a red X close the lane to protect the scene, but you should never assume that every approaching driver has seen or obeyed them, so stay behind the barrier until help arrives.

The law is specific about what a driver involved in an accident must do. You must stop. Where another person, vehicle or property is involved, you must give your name, address and the vehicle's registration to anyone with reasonable grounds to ask for them, and where someone has been injured you must also produce your insurance details. Driving away from an accident you were involved in is an offence, even if you believe nobody was hurt and the damage looks minor.

If details were not exchanged at the scene for any reason, perhaps the other driver left, or the scene was cleared quickly for safety, you must report the accident to the police as soon as reasonably practicable, and in any case within 24 hours. On a motorway this matters more than usual, because scenes are broken up fast to reopen lanes, and it is genuinely common for drivers to be moved apart before every detail has been swapped.

Insurance liability is decided weeks later, on paper, by people who were not there. What they see is what you captured. Where it is safe to do so, and only from behind the barrier or before the vehicles are moved, photograph the positions of the vehicles, the damage to each, the road layout, any skid marks or debris, and the conditions: rain, spray, low sun, standing water. Photograph the other vehicle's registration plate rather than trusting it to memory.

Take the other driver's name, contact details and insurer, and the details of any independent witnesses, meaning people who are not passengers in either car; a witness with no stake in the outcome carries real weight with insurers. If you have a dashcam, save the clip now. Most units record on a loop and overwrite themselves within hours, and footage of the moments before the impact settles more liability arguments than any other single piece of evidence.

On the motorway network you will often be reached first not by the police but by National Highways traffic officers. Their job is to protect the scene and get the road moving again: they set the red X and lane closures, position their vehicle to shield yours, check on the people involved, and coordinate the police, ambulance service and recovery. They do not investigate fault and they do not decide your claim.

They will also move vehicles, sometimes quickly. A car sitting in a live lane is a danger to everyone approaching it, so traffic officers can and do clear the carriageway before anyone has taken a photograph. If that happens to you, it was done for good reason, and it is precisely why the dashcam clip, the quick photo taken from behind the barrier and the mental note of where each vehicle came to rest matter so much. The claim can still be proven; it simply leans harder on what you saved.

Once everyone is safe and the immediate duties are done, call for recovery. Tell the controller you are on a motorway, give the marker post number or junction range if you can see one, and say whether the police or traffic officers are already in attendance. Our trucks work these scenes constantly: the vehicle arrives, positions itself as a protective barrier between the traffic and the working area, and the damaged car is loaded and taken off the carriageway to a safe location, an approved repairer, or secure storage.

Then the question every driver asks: who pays. If the accident was not your fault, the recovery cost is one of the losses that flows from the other driver's negligence, and it is claimed from their insurer along with repairs, storage and a replacement vehicle. That is why a genuine non-fault recovery can cost you nothing: not because it is free to provide, but because the right insurer pays for it. When liability is unclear or disputed, that position changes, and we explain exactly where you stand on the phone, before a truck is dispatched and before anything is charged. From there the claim itself is handed to CityGrip Accident Claims, our sister company within the same group, so the costs and the liability argument are pursued as one case rather than left for you to chase in pieces.