How Customizing Your Vehicle Can Increase The Likelihood Of Rollovers

Essentially we’re talking about physics and the aerodynamics of your vehicle and it’s common sense that’s going to tell you that if your vehicle is skinnier and it’s taller, it’s going to be more likely to roll over and that’s why cars and trucks are specifically designed in a way that will hopefully prevent that from occurring. The whole engineering behind all of it is that they’re trying to keep you as safe as humanly possible.

What happens is people get vehicles and they customize their vehicles as you’re certainly entitled to do as a consumer. Specifically what I’m talking about is when people go out and they customize their tires. You don’t really think about it. You go out and you get a nice set of rims and you get the tires to match and you get the vehicle and you get it looking the way that you want it to.

What you’ve actually done is you’ve altered the factory settings of what the car was supposed to be when it was on the road and you have unknowingly made it more likely that your car is going to roll over and let me demonstrate with just a hypothetical example.

Take for instance you’re driving in a Ford Explorer. The typical wheel base for a Ford Explorer is supposed to be I think 57.5 inches between the two wheels.

When you go out and you get the customized rims and the tires that come with it, you can actually narrow the wheel base by as little as an inch. In doing so, let’s say hypothetically you’re taking a right turn at 45 degrees and it has been raining recently.

If you have the standard wheel base that the factory intended when the car was originally issued, you’re going to go through that and you’re not going to roll over.

But if you get those customized wheels that are slightly thinner and it reduces the wheel base by as little as an inch, you can take that 45-degree angle and you can bring it to where you’re going to flip at a 26 to 27-degree angle and the car is going to roll over and you’re potentially going to be hurt.

So my message to you and my public service announcement as a practicing personal injury attorney is be very careful when you’re customizing your vehicle and make sure that you take this sort of factor into account and try to keep the factory settings as far as the wheel base is concerned, so that you can prevent yourself from being injured in the future.

If you have questions please contact the Hartman Law Firm at 843-300-7600.

What To Do If You Don't Have Collision Coverage, And The Other Driver Is Avoiding You

When you’re in this situation, you are going to find that it’s kind of like being in purgatory because essentially, the defendant’s insurance company is not going to make a decision with regard to liability until they get a recorded statement from their insured about the facts surrounding the auto collision.

If the defendant refuses to answer the telephone call, then essentially you’re sitting at home with no car and they’re not moving forward on your property damage claim and you’re kind of wondering, “Well, how am I going to get back and forth to work?”

This is what I would suggest you do if you find yourself in this situation. I would go and I would get a rental car and I would make sure that you keep the receipts and you mitigate your damages. You want to keep the value of the rental that you’re going to get at $30 a day or less because that’s typically what an insurance company is going to be willing to pay for a rental car.

So get a mid-sized, economic-sized vehicle because you want to keep the price down. Go ahead and rent that so that you can get to work and you can do the various things that you need to do. When they finally do get their insured on the telephone two to three weeks later, then they will eventually accept liability. At that point, you can say, “Look, I’ve had a rental car for the past two weeks,” and you can present that bill for the rental car to them as part of the property damage claim.

The other thing that I would encourage you to do as far as being proactive is go ahead and let them know where your car is so that they can go and they can send an adjuster out to make a decision as to whether they’re going to total the car out.

They can still do that even if they haven’t talked to their insured and it will good if you can go ahead and cross that off the list of things that the insurance company needs to do. It’s a way of being proactive and making sure that your property damage claim moves forward as quickly as possible once they actually talk to their insured.

If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact the Hartman Law Firm, LLC at (843) 300-7600 for a free consultation! 

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How To Rotate Your Tires and Why You Should Do It This Way

Now what’s interesting about this is it actually goes against the grain of your typical common sense and what I have always operated under, which is most people are under the impression that you should keep the best tires that you have on the front axle of your vehicle.

Most vehicles typically are going to be front wheel drive vehicles and so the common knowledge has been that you keep your best tires on your front, your two front wheels. In actuality, studies show that it’s better if you have your newer tires on your rear axle and here’s the reason why and here’s why it’s relevant to Charleston, South Carolina specifically and the people that live in my area.

Roughly between 2:30 and 3:30 in the afternoon during spring and summer in Charleston. Invariably it’s going to rain anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour. You’re going to have two or three inches of water on your interstates and your secondary roads that wasn’t there previously and we have a lot of car wrecks as a result.

If you put your tires on the rear axle of your vehicles, you have better control in the event of hydroplaning which begs the question, “What is hydroplaning?” Hydroplaning is where water gets between the road surface and the actual surface of your tire.

It causes you to lose traction and you will veer off course into the other lane or potentially off the road. So in that respect, it is very beneficial to you as a driver if you keep your tires on the rear of your car.

You typically get your tires rotated every time you get your oil changed. This is a good reason why you should have the best tires placed on your rear axle.

If you have any questions, contact The Hartman Law Firm today at 843-300-7600.

How can you get a divorce without a lawyer in the State of South Carolina?

This process is called getting a divorce “pro se” which is a Latin term that essentially means moving forward on your own as in you do not have legal representation and the first thing that I would encourage you to do is to go to www.scbar.org. That’s South Carolina Bar dot org and that’s a website for the South Carolina Bar Association which is the association that governs lawyers in the State of South Carolina.

If you look in the lower left hand corner of the website, you will see that there’s a packet that is specifically for people who want to move forward and get a divorce pro se.

The basis that you will be moving forward under South Carolina law is living separate and apart for one calendar year. What I mean by that is that both the husband and the wife are going to have to live separate and apart. Somebody is going to have to get an apartment and they’re going to have to move out of the marital home and they’re going to have to establish that they’re no longer residing with one another and they’re going to have to be able to prove that with an independent witness in court that they have lived separate and apart for more than one year.

The reason being is South Carolina as a state wants to encourage people to remain married and they want to give them a cooling off period and some time to think about whether they actually want to move forward and get a divorce or not. So that’s why you actually have to wait a year.

An important thing to note, when people call me, a lot of times they’re looking to get a divorce but they don’t have the necessary means financially to be able to afford it. So that’s why I’m giving this information out.

They can move forward under this basis and essentially pay the court costs and paperwork, administrative overhead and spare themselves the cost of actually getting a lawyer if they use this particular means to do so. The downside is it really boils down to where you have a husband and a wife who don’t have any children and essentially don’t have very much in the way of marital property because those are the things that tend to complicate divorces.

It’s really just where you’ve got two people who want the state to dissolve their civil union and they really don’t have a lot between them except the romantic interlude that has ended unfortunately and they’re just looking for a resolution to that.

The last point that we need to consider is something that people run into a good bit factually when they’re calling me about divorces and that’s if you’re in a situation where you’ve living separate and apart from your husband and/or wife, and you reconcile – by reconcile, I mean that the husband and/or wife comes over and they spend the night or you guys decide to try to get back together and you spend two weeks together, living at home and then you realize, wait a minute, this isn’t working out.

When you reconcile, it restarts the clock and that means that you have to again demonstrate that you guys are living separate and apart for one calendar year. So it’s important if you do decide to make this step and move forward on your own that you kind of go with your gut and you stick to your guns.

You live separate and apart. You fulfill the obligations required by the state and you move forward with the paperwork.

If you have questions concerning divorce please contact The Hartman Law Firm at 843-300-7600 today!