Hit a Deer in NJ: Which Coverage Pays, and What to Do in the First Ten Minutes

Autumn is when the deer move. Through the fall breeding season they are on their feet at dawn and at dusk, crossing roads they do not normally cross, and those are the same hours most of us are driving to work or coming home from it. If you want to know what the season actually looks like where you live, the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife is the authority on the state's herd and its behavior. We are not going to quote you a crash statistic from memory.

What we can tell you is what happens on the insurance side, because that part surprises people. A deer claim is not one coverage. It is a fork, and which branch you land on gets decided in about half a second on a dark road.

Two coverages. One deer.

If you hit the deer, the damage to your car is generally handled under comprehensive coverage — the part of an auto policy that covers things that happen to your vehicle without another vehicle being involved.

If you swerve, miss the deer, and hit a tree, a guardrail, a utility pole or another car, that is generally collision coverage instead.

Same animal, same road, same night — and two different coverages, which very often carry two different deductibles. Comprehensive and collision are priced separately, and most people set those two numbers years apart without ever noticing they are not the same.

Two different coverages. Often two different deductibles. Same deer.

There is a third branch worth naming out loud. If a car carries liability only — no comprehensive, no collision — then neither one pays to fix it, in either version of the story. Liability coverage pays for damage you do to other people and their property. A deer is not other people.

If you dropped those coverages on purpose, a deer is not a reason to undo it

Plenty of people in New Jersey carry liability only on an older car, and most of them did it deliberately. If a car is worth a couple of thousand dollars, and comprehensive and collision cost real money every year against a deductible that eats a good share of what the car is even worth, the arithmetic can honestly favor going without. That was a real trade, and October does not change it.

Where a second look is worth the five minutes is the newer car in the same driveway — or the car that was the cheap older car four years ago and is now being driven by someone who just got a license. Those are different conversations, and one of them is probably sitting in your household right now.

The first ten minutes

This is the part worth reading before you need it, because the order matters and nobody thinks clearly at the time.

• Get off the road if the car will move. Hazards on, as far onto the shoulder as you can get. The second collision is the real danger after the first one, and on a two-lane road at dusk it happens quickly.

• Do not approach the animal. An injured deer is large, strong and panicked, and it can hurt you badly without intending to. Stay in the car, or stay well clear of it.

• Call the police. Your local department, or the State Police on a state highway or the Parkway. You may want a report, a carcass may need to come out of a travel lane, and if the car is not drivable they are the ones who get a tow moving.

• Photograph more than the dent. The damage, yes — but also the whole car from a few steps back, the road and the direction you were traveling, any debris or skid marks, the light conditions, and the animal if you can do it safely from a distance. Pictures are the cheapest thing you will ever do for a claim, and the shot people forget is always the wide one.

• Check whether the car is actually safe to drive. Fluid on the pavement, a radiator pushed back, a headlight out, a hood that will not latch, an airbag that went off. If any of that is true, it is a tow and not a drive home.

• Then call your agent. Not first. Once you are safe, off the road, and holding the pictures.

If that sequence feels familiar, it is because most of it applies to any crash. We wrote the longer version for accidents involving another driver: The First 48 Hours After a NJ Car Accident.

Reporting, and one thing we are not going to tell you

New Jersey has rules about when a motor vehicle accident has to be reported and on what form. Those are set by the state, and we are not going to recite a threshold or a deadline from memory — that is exactly the kind of detail that gets updated, and getting it wrong would cost you something rather than nothing. The NJ Motor Vehicle Commission is the authority.

There is also a faster option standing right in front of you at the time: ask the responding officer, before they leave, whether a report is being filed and how you get a copy. That takes about fifteen seconds and it beats any article.

What it does to your rate

This is the question everyone actually wants answered, and the honest version is longer than it looks — so we gave it its own article: When Filing a Small Claim Costs More Than It Pays. The short form is that whether a claim is worth filing depends on your deductible, the real repair number, and the fact that a renewal difference recurs while a repair bill does not.

Two things worth adding here. First, we are not going to tell you how your carrier treats an animal claim at renewal, because that varies by company and we are not going to guess at yours. Second, a deer does real damage — a hood, a fender, a radiator, sometimes a windshield — so if the repair lands well past your deductible, the question tends to answer itself. If you want the general picture of what moves a New Jersey rate, that is here, and the county-level version is here.

Two numbers to look at tonight

If you do one thing after reading this, do this. It takes under a minute. Your declarations page — the summary sheet your carrier mails at every renewal — lists coverages car by car.

• Does every car on the policy carry both comprehensive and collision? On older cars, often not. Sometimes that is correct. You just want to know which cars are which before November rather than after.

• Are the two deductibles the same number? They frequently are not. If comprehensive sits at one figure and collision at another, then hitting the deer and missing the deer cost you different amounts out of pocket for the very same night.

We are not going to tell you what your deductibles are. Those numbers are written down, and you already own a copy.

Who to call first — and some of it is not us

For a carcass in a travel lane or a car that will not move, the police. For anything about deer activity, the herd or the season, the Division of Fish and Wildlife. For a repair number you can actually rely on, a local body shop, in writing, before anybody opens a claim — half the people agonizing over whether to file are agonizing over an estimate they invented in their own head.

Then call us. In that order.

If you want a second set of eyes on it

Christopher Dean & Associates, PC is an independent agency in Brielle, New Jersey (NJ Producer License 9954304). Independent means we are not tied to a single carrier: one application, several companies compared side by side, and a straight answer about whether what you already have is fine. Sometimes it is, and we will say so.

Start a free comparison at igoquote.com or call 844-446-4628. Not because this is expensive to sort out in October, but because standing on a shoulder at a quarter past six on a November evening, looking at a hood that will not close, is the expensive way to find out which of your two deductibles applies — or that neither one does.

This article is general information about how auto coverage usually works in New Jersey, not advice about your specific policy. Coverage, eligibility and terms vary by carrier, and the language in your own policy is what controls a claim.