Survey Says: Spouses Lie About Dings and Accidents

Ever come home to find the car has somehow mysteriously acquired a new ding, scratch or dent? How did it get there, you ask. A new study out from internet consumer and information site Insure.com has attempted to answer that question by asking married couples whether they lie to their spouses about their driving habits.

Of the 1,000 married people surveyed, 35% admitted to dinging the car themselves and telling their spouse that someone else did it. Fully one quarter said they kept a traffic ticket secret from their spouse, and nearly that many have kept a car accident secret.

Men are apparently worse than women in terms of the lying to their significant other. With results for husbands and wives compared, 42% of men surveyed dinged the car themselves and blamed someone else, while only 27% of women said they’d done so. But despite the data suggesting husbands lie more to their wives than the other way around, 38% of men said that they thought it was possible or knew for a fact that their wives were lying about keeping an accident secret; only 17% of wives said that they had done so. Conversely, it looks like wives are a bit too trusting of their husbands; 23% say that they either knew or thought it possible that their husbands had kept an accident secret, while 31% of husbands said they had.

“Women may see the family’s car insurance rates rising and not realize their husbands’ deceptive behavior is money out of their pockets,” said Amy Danise, editorial director for Insure.com.

Of course, the one piece of data that this survey doesn’t tell us? The percentage of people who lie on internet surveys.

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