There are two issues here, firstly responsibility for the accident itself, and secondly the actions of the insurance company. As far as the first is concerned, in order to make a claim against another person, you have to demonstrate that the other person owed you a duty of care and that they breached that duty of care. All road users have a duty to drive in such a way as not to cause injury or damage to others. A breach of that duty will arise if the driver has been negligent. In the present case, both drivers had a duty to keep a proper lookout. Given the limited information available, it seems that both drivers might have been at fault in this respect, otherwise why was neither able to see the other? Overriding this mutual duty is the duty on the turning driver to ensure that it was safe to carry out the manoeuvre before proceeding to do so. The fact that she was hit by the other car which was travelling at a relatively low speed suggests that she failed to do this properly, and responsibility for the accident largely rests with her. As has already been suggested, the other driver could be said to have been contributorily negligent as she failed to see the turning vehicle in front of her. However, the original hazard was caused by the turning vehicle, so the greater degree of negligence rests with the driver of the turning vehicle with the balance resting with the other driver. In this sort of accident, a 75/25 allocation is quite common. The second issue is the action of the insurance company. One common misperception is that insurance companies are there to uphold your legal rights. In fact, insurance is a financial service, and the insurance company's responsibility is to protect you from the financial costs of the accident. When a claim is made against you by another party, the insurance company indemnifies you by dealing with and, when necessary, paying the other party's claim. The insurer may try to defend the claim, but is under no obligation to do so if this would be uneconomical. In any event, insurance policies generally contain a clause authorising the insurer to take over the conduct of a claim as it sees fit - you can no more insist that it defends a claim than you can insist that it pays one when it is not liable to do so. AIn the present case it is probably not worth trying too hard to defend the claim for the 25% contribution that might be available if it were pressed to the bitter end. Having said that, there is nothing to stop you trying to claim against the other party for a contribution to the cost of repairs to your own car. However, that contribution would be limited to the amount of contributory negligence that you were able to establish on the other party which, as I said earlier, is probably around 25%. Given the time, trouble and possible expense that you would have to go to to do this, I would suggest that it is probably not worth the trouble. All in all, I'd put this one down to experience and try to forget about it.