The Good Garage Scheme finds drivers scraping parked cars and fleeing costs British motorists £169m per year

Innocent motorists are being hit with huge repair costs because of fellow drivers who flee after crashing into parked cars, according to a report.

Nearly a fifth of motorists who crash into unoccupied vehicles flee without leaving their contact or car insurance details, a survey by Accident Exchange has found. The research suggests that there are an estimated 700,000 crashes involving parked cars, with a fifth of these occurring in car parks and the remaining on the streets.

In 56 per cent of these cases, the third party either found or contacted the owner directly, while in 20 per cent of cases a note was left at the scene. In a total of 18.5 per cent of cases, the guilty motorist drove off without offering insurance details or even leaving a note.

Even more worrying for motorists, police managed to track down less than five per cent of these cases, meaning a huge amount of parked car crash instigators are getting away with it.

“Parked car prangs cost the insurance industry more than £1.2bn annually in repairs,” says Lee Woodley of Accident Exchange. “It’s therefore appalling to think that £169m of that figure has to be picked up by the innocent motorists’ own insurance policy.”

It is expected that with more than a third of all households owning two or more vehicles, combined with off-road parking within cities at a premium, the number of parked car incidents would continue to rise.