Aside from the state mandating us to purchase a car insurance policy, we get coverage that we need to protect the most important investment in our life-ourselves.

When the time comes that the insurance providers have to serve their main purpose, that is when an accident happened, we as policy providers must be well-equipped with proper knowledge on what to do.

If an accident comes our way first thing that we must do is to check on the damages and injuries the said incident has caused. After checking on yours make sure to check on the other party’s damages and injuries as well.

Documenting the damages and injuries is important. Take pictures of the car damages. As for the injuries, pertinent documents on treatment, temporary or permanent disability and prognosis for recovery must be secured.

If the accident was too bad and caused you with some hospitalization, it’s best to keep copies of all your medical reports and expenses. This may include expenses on ambulance, emergency room, doctor, hospital, medical equipments, medicine and the like. If your case would require medical treatments in the future an estimate from your doctor must be documented as well.

Aside from the medical expenses, documenting any other expenses like for special damages and general damages must be documented and must be presented to the adjuster.

In making negotiations, the adjuster will be asking you for some information about the accident. During this time you have to be consistent with your statement. Another thing is that you must be able to support whatever you say or write with documents. This is where the medical records and expenses documentation plus special and general damages information are pivotal.

In settling claims it is advisable not to hurry and just grab whatever offer was first given. Assess the amount offered and if you feel compensated enough with it then you may go for it. However keep in mind that adjusters are aiming at closing a deal with the cheapest value possible. If you are far from being sure what your claim is worth it would not hurt to ask for some legal advice.

These are just some of the major things that you have to keep in mind when the time of claiming what you deserve comes. You can always make a demand from your car insurance provider just make sure that you have supporting documents to justify you naming your own price.

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It was all done in the spirit of the great car race tradition of old and the long road stretched all the way from the US to Central America. The only thing unique about it was the fact that all the participating vehicles ran on vegetable oil power, or to be more precise, SVO or straight vegetable oil.

This 4500 mile race went through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras on to Nicaragua then Costa Rica. And April 1, 2007 saw history of a kind being created in automobile fuels.

The fact of the matter is that most vehicles can run on vegetable oils with a little bit of engine modification. Of course, if the vehicle doesn’t have a catalytic converter you could just have a strong odor emanating from it, rather like something cooking but other than that, the engine runs and it is very cheap to run.

The engine modification does not take more than a couple of hundred dollars to do and this low-cost and low-tech solution could well be what the future needs, not just in terms of price but in terms of environmental issues as well.

What this race set out to do was to draw people’s attention to the fact that biofuels could be very practical to use and especially so in developing countries.

The race had five participants. No, they were not young kids with a sense of adventure but teams that wanted to make a difference to the world. They were Quest for the Golden Grease, Team ZERO, Greased Lightning, Quantum Heap and The Frying Burrito Brothers.

Two of them were sponsored by the company Grease car who fitted them out with conversion kits and with filtration systems on board. The event was purely for charity. At the end of the race, the vehicles were donated to some of the local groups.

All along the way, the aim was to garner support for alternative fuels especially vegetable oils which were available in plenty and could be filtered and reused.

One of the participants in the race was Suzanne Hunt and she was part of the team Greased Lightning. She happens to be the director of the bioenergy program for the WorldWatch Institute, while her partner Jean-Phillipe Denruyter from Belgium is the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Bioenergy Coordinator.

So not only did the race make a statement for looking at environment-friendly alternative fuels, it did it with a lot of splash and panache.

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Car and Driver , no issue of our magazine receives as much attention as the one you hold in your hands. . . either from you or from us. To say nothing of the attention it now gets from other media. The Ten Best issue is not only our annual best seller, it is also the issue that requires the most work. That work, however, is labor freely given in the cause of bringing you, our subscribers and our readers, yet another Ten Best issue.

Parts of the issue are taken with great seriousness—beginning with the Ten Best Cars, a compendium that has come to be synonymous with excellence in the auto industry and among enthusiasts.

As always, we’ve done nine other sections to inform and entertain you. Below is a rundown of these, presented with our usual hope that you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed doing it.

Patrick Bedard, who knows as much about Detroit iron as anyone you’ll find, puts a slightly different slant on the Ten Best Muscle Cars—concentrating on the cars of our past that had real muscle, never mind what they might have lacked. You’ll be surprised at some of his selections.

Brock Yates selects the Ten Best Racing Personalities, with emphasis on the personality. No sullen Formula 1 dullards here. He also includes the Ten Best Racing Names. Coo Coo Marlin was a shoo-in. Can you guess the others?

As an adjunct to the Ten Best Cars feature, David Kunkler, our newest technocrat, has compiled the Ten Best Performers of 1989. Among other statistics, David has ferreted out the fastest, the quietest, and the most economical cars from our 1989 test files.

Based on submissions from you readers, Arthur St. Antoine has compiled lurid stories of the Ten Best Speed Traps. You’ll want to read these tales carefully: this could be a money-saving section for all.

Tony Assenza, late of the dusty desert, has been given the task of anointing the Ten Best Winners and Losers of 1989. As you might expect, Tony has brought his peculiar view of life, liberty, and the pursuit of old movies to his selections.

John Phillips III, who came to us in the middle of last year, has arrayed for you the Ten Best Aftermarket Atrocities, ten automotive accessories actually available for sale that are guaranteed to make you the laughingstock of your neighborhood. Maybe your city.

Larry Griffin returns with a fresh list of the Ten Best Driver’s Roads. He’s done this story before, and your letters indicate that his selections are impeccable. Mary Beth Lewis chips in with the Ten Best Road Signs of the year—all uncovered by eagle-eyed readers.

Csaba Csere has gazed into his crystal ball and nominated the Ten Best Things to Come, breakthroughs and advances that will quite likely appear on our automobiles or in our lives before we get much older. “Smart” highways are not among Csaba’s ten.

Nicholas Bissoon-Dath, martial-arts practitioner, aerodynamicist, and bon vivant has taken time away from testing cars to select the Ten Best Reader Car Designs, fantasies of the future sent in by you readers.

Rich Ceppos has wrecked our library (and some other reference sources) in his fevered attempt at naming the Ten Best Inspired Designs—cars with exteriors that either changed the world or caused one hell of a lot of talk.

Last, as always, is first. Our editor’s description of the Ten Best Cars leads off this year’s Ten Best issue, beginning on page 44.

Enjoy!

Last year, we said that selecting the

Car and Driver Ten Best Cars had become fraught with difficulty. Well, it’s worse this year. Worse, however, means better—from your standpoint and ours. Today, we face a larger choice of better cars than at any time in history. If any of you out there don’t believe we are living in a Golden Age of automobiles, we suggest that you exchange the unexpired portion of your subscription for a membership in the Flat Earth Society.

No fewer than 41 cars were nominated for our 1990 Ten Best list, and fully 35 of those could have earned a spot on our honors list without apology. Six turned out to be either unsuitable prototypes or not as good as we remembered. A complete list of the nominees appears on page 51.

Our Ten Best Cars having achieved the status of an institution, we believe our readers should know how we go about choosing them. First, we take nominations—requiring a second—from the staff at large. The only restriction placed on the field is a maximum base price of $35,000, a figure representing just under two and a half times the cost of the average new car sold in the U.S.

We next assemble all the nominees at a remote and undisclosed location in Michigan and drive each of the cars during a ten-day evaluation period. The evaluations are entirely subjective, but the staff is provided with our previous test results and as-tested prices in addition to the cars’ base prices.

New for this year is the removal of a policy of long standing: the selection of five domestics and five imports. We did this for two reasons: one, it’s growing ever more difficult to determine what is and what isn’t an import (Mazda MX-6s and Ford Probes built in Michigan on the same line by American workers using American materials, for example) and, two, we believe it’s time to acknowledge the improvements made by the domestic manufacturers and to stop demeaning them with a quota system.

Other than that change, we continue as before. This year, eight staff members drove all the cars and then voted on them. Two of us counted the ballots.

Five of the winners were overwhelming favorites. All ten received a majority of the votes. We can say that the second five could easily have been the second ten—the voting was that close. The Ford Thunderbird SC—the automatic version—missed by an eyelash. The Ford Probe wasn’t far behind. Nor was the Nissan Stanza. You’ll note that the Corvette is missing this year. That’s because one of the winners, a brand-new car, simply made it feel old. Not bad, you understand, just old. Other new entries cost the Lincoln Continental and the Saab 9000 Turbo their places on the leader board. And those were just some of the hard choices.

Look over the list of nominees, try to pick your own winners, and you’ll see just how difficult our task was. But before you do that, read all about our winners. In alphabetical order,

Car and Driver’s Ten Best Cars for 1990.

And in other news that year: Top-selling Cars: Honda Accord, Ford Taurus, Chevrolet Cavalier

Winner of Super Bowl XXIV: Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture: Winner of the World Series: Sources: Top-selling Cars, Ward’s Automotive Year Book; Super Bowl Winners, SuperBowl.com; Best Picture Winners, Oscars.org; World Series Winners, WorldSeries.com

Article source: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/archive/1990_10best_cars-10best_cars