If you want your car to look great, few things matter more than looking after your paintwork. Regular cleaning is part of that, but so is ensuring it avoids scratches and blemishes that can come from fairly minor bumps and scrapes, but leave an unpleasant visual mark.
This is a great reason to get car paint protection film installed and that may be particularly true if you either live in or visit an area where car damage is rather more common than usual.
In some parts of the UK, driving is usually safe and accidents of any severity level are fairly rare. But in others, the reverse is true.
Britain’s Collision Hotspots
A study by car parts marketplace Ovoko recently highlighted the variations between areas with a study of Department of Transport data, the Daily Mirror reported last month.
Examining road accident statistics between 2013 and 2022, it found, not surprisingly, that London was the most likely place to have an accident.
However, what may have come as a surprise was that the worst place outside the congested roads of the capital was Blackpool, where there were 1,289 collisions per billion vehicle miles. Perhaps it’s best to rise on the historic trams instead when visiting the resort.
Based on this metric, it was another coastal location in the north, Hull, which came second. Indeed, several of the top ten for accidents were close to the sea, with Brighton, Bournemouth, Southampton, and Southend also on the list.
Heading inland from Blackpool may not always be the safest move either, as fellow Lancashire town Blackburn was on the list. Inland southern towns listed included Reading and Luton. Notably, there was an absence of big provincial cities on the list, the largest in the top ten accident blackspots being Nottingham.
That may come as a relief to drivers in big cities like Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds. But the reality is that a collision can happen anywhere and you need to be prepared for it.
A spokesman for Ovoko said: “While London may dominate the top ten for dangerous driving areas, to see how diverse the locations of the other dangerous areas are is interesting as well.”
Crashes need Not Be At High Speed
While a big smash can write a car off or leave it needing extensive repairs (not to mention the danger of death or injury), sometimes incidents are much more minor, involving low-speed collisions in places like car parks or garages, while trying to slip between parked cars on a narrow street, or amid a rush-hour traffic jam.
In these cases, the worst that may happen is some scratched paintwork. But if you have the right protection, you may find you can escape even this.
Hitting another vehicle, or an object such as a wall or bollard, is one way of damaging the paintwork. But there are others, such as objects flying up from the road as cars drive over them. This can happen when there is grit on an icy road in winter, loose gravel after roadworks, or when there is debris after a previous accident.
The Perils Of Potholes
However, one of the biggest problems faced by motorists is the poor quality of many roads, particularly the presence of potholes. These can do more than just burst tyres and damage the suspension; they can also damage your paintwork by causing scratches to it.
Indeed, if the damage is a little deeper, this can cause oxidisation and rust, causing the paint to peel.
This particularly matters now because even though many roads all over the UK are in a poor state, cash-strapped councils either can’t or won’t fix them all. A study by the RAC and Channel 4’s Despatches programme has found that more than a third of local authorities in England will not take action on a pothole unless it has reached a certain size.
Among the local councils with very strict criteria include five requiring potholes to be at least 5cm deep before they are fixed, while 13 require them to be at least 30 cm across and 4cm deep before they will take action. The former category includes Nottingham, so pothole risks can be added to the high number of collisions there.
With the RAC reporting that call-outs arising from pothole incidents were a third higher last year than in 2022, there is clearly much to be concerned about.
Once again, this risk to cars stretches well beyond just the risks of paintwork being damaged, but it reinforces the point that taking steps to protect your paintwork is well worth doing at a time when the risk to it is clearly higher than it has been for many years.
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