Got rear-ended during a zipper merge slowdown — is this even partly my fault?
Still trying to wrap my head around what happened last week so bear with me.
I was on the interstate where two lanes squeeze into one before an overpass — anybody who drives that stretch knows traffic stacks up there every single afternoon. I'd been in the through lane, moving with the flow, keeping what I thought was solid following distance from the SUV in front of me.
Out of nowhere a pickup from the merging lane cuts in between me and that SUV. Fine, whatever, I backed off a little to give him room. But then he just stomps his brakes — like full stop, no gradual slowdown, just done. I had maybe a second and a half to react. I hit my brakes hard but couldn't avoid tapping the pickup's rear bumper. Not a huge impact but enough that both our hoods got messed up and my airbags deployed.
Here's where my head is spinning: the pickup driver is now telling his insurance that I was following too close the whole time and that the merge had nothing to do with it. My dashcam caught most of it but the angle isn't perfect — you can see him cut in but it's hard to tell exactly how much space I had.
His insurer called me within like 36 hours and the adjuster was surprisingly friendly, kept asking me to just walk her through everything in detail. I almost just told her the whole story but something felt off so I said I'd call back.
Does the merge factor into fault at all here? Can his sudden stop actually shift any blame onto him? And was I right to pump the brakes on that recorded statement?