Quoted for emphasis. Again, speaking as a former insurance agent and adjuster, when possible, you want this to happen EVEN if your own coverage has rental. Because most policies are written as rental REIMBURSEMENT up to $ x per day up to x days, often capping at 20-30 days.
So, yes, it’s faster, and for that matter key to use your own insurance in a disputed loss, and may not have any other options if vehicle is undrivable, but otherwise, having an at-fault other party pay will generally get a usable rental without the reimbursement issue as well as ‘for the duration’ rental car.
To be honest, it’s not normally this bad, and if your repairs were going to be more than 30 days I’d expect it was a total loss anyway, but… nothing is normal in this post COVID world and probably won’t be for another few years.
Yup, I just checked mine - $50 per day, maximum $1350, and that’s the highest limit available. As you say it’s reimbursement, not any kind of obligation to find you a car at a sensible price. Car rentals are incredibly expensive right now - I just checked, and renting a car for a month - even if you commit to the entire month - is $1500 in my area for the tiniest car.
Maybe not. I was once hit by someone who was at fault. And although I got her insurance info, her company wouldn’t accept a claim from me because she hadn’t reported the accident. I didn’t have collision or comprehensive so my insurance wasn’t going to pay - but I did report it to them just in case the other driver made a claim ( which she did ). My company told me that the standard insurance contract required her to report the accident and her company wouldn’t pay me until she did so - so I should sue her in small claims court , and that would likely cause her to notify the company. And it did - I got paid a couple of days after she was served. Cost me about $20.
Yes, in hindsight this is 100% right. We were too keen to start the repairs immediately in the hopes that we would get our car back in two weeks, rather than wait to work out a rental with the at-fault insurance. I hope I will not be in a position to make this mistake again
Several people have made claims along these lines, but I don’t know why this should be so.
Even assuming that the at-fault driver is liable for the cost of a rental car, that doesn’t mean that his insurer is required to cover that liability. If this guy’s contract with his insurer says they’re required to reimburse him for certain specific liabilities that he may incur, then that’s all they’re on the hook for, and any other liabilities that he may incur are his own responsibility.
Unless there’s some sort of law in that state that all auto liability policies must cover rental cars. I doubt if that’s the case, though, and if it’s not, it would seem pretty straightforward that whether or not the insurer needs to cover a rental depends on the terms of the insurance contract.
And in this particular case, the fact that the other driver’s insurer said explicitly that their policy does not cover it would tend to tilt the odds towards thinking that they’re not liable. It’s been suggested that this was a misunderstanding, and this is certainly possible, but by no means certain.
If this turns out to be the case, then it may still be that the other driver owes the OP a rental car, but he would need to take it up with them (and good luck with that!) and not with the insurer.
ETA: I see that doreen’s post above makes the same basic point (albeit regarding a different issue), that the driver’s liability does not automatically translate to his insurer’s liability.
You have more patience than me. When I got rear ended last summer, I called his boss, I called their insurance company. After about a day I felt like I was getting screwed with so I called my insurance and filed the claim with them. The ‘short’ version of what happened is that I had a check in my hand within a day or two from my insurance and then my insurance went after their insurance (and were fully refunded).
I remember at one point I mentioned to their insurance that I went and saw my doctor and she flipped out and told me I have to get permission first. I remember saying something to the extent of “Your client hit me with a school bus, pushed me down the road, up the curb and over the sidewalk and you’re telling me I’m not allowed to see my own doctor? Do I need to hire a lawyer” to which she replied “email me the bill so I can get it reimbursed”. That was part of what made me decide to get my insurance company involved.
Similarly, I got into a fender bender in a parking lot. The guy gave me his insurance info, I tried to file a claim with them for the $600 in damages to my car. Their insurance company said he doesn’t have a policy with them and they launched a fraud investigation. On advice on my insurance broker, I turned the whole thing over to the state and suddenly he showed up at my work with a check.
Liability insurance covers the other guys loss and right now that loss is the use of the OP’s vehicle. I’ve had people hit me and I’ve had there insurance try to screw me. But they always paid for a rental car while mine was being repaired. If for some outlandish reason the other guys insurance won’t pay for a rental then the OP needs to get one anyway and then sue for reimbursement.
No offense intended, but the OP needs to grow a spine. It seems like he’s getting pushed around from all sides on this.
Actually, the insurer doesn’t have its own liability - it has an obligation to cover the insured’s liability under some circumstances. (and apparently in my state the obligation doesn’t exist until the insured reports the incident). But generally speaking, liability insurance doesn’t list specific things it will cover- it’s listed in generalities such as property damage , which I expect includes payment for a rental vehicle to cover the loss of use caused by the at-fault drivers negligence. I mean, if a vehicle crashed into my house and destroyed my kitchen, I think my damages would include what it cost to obtain meals while waiting for my kitchen to be repaired even if that wasn’t specified in at-fault driver’s policy.
I think that’s a bit harsh. It’s complicated and difficult to understand exactly what you are entitled to. It’s not a good tactic to start getting mad until you know exactly what your rights are, or you might just alienate people who don’t have any obligation to do anything for you.
Exactly. The exact policy language varies from state to state, but within a state, it’s standard, (at least for basic limits) and it covers the liability of the insured for property damage and bodily injuries they are liable for as a result of what they did while driving. “Property damage” includes not just the cost of damage to your car, but the cost of your not having access to your car while it is being repaired.
Okay, again, as someone who did this sort of thing for years, you are largely correct - with the proviso that there are huge numbers of variations in how the policies are written and how laws work in various states, especially no-fault or partial no fault states.
General insurance law is built around making the parties involved whole, although often poorly. So if there is a direct causal link (and occasionally indirect) between your verifiable and quantifiable losses and the accident, the policy in question will pay UP TO IT’S CONTRACTUAL LIMITS to offset the costs, as long as they are ‘usual and customary’.
This is kinda key, because, for example, if I demand my repairs be done at my shop of choice (which is in most states legally mandated) BUT my shop costs 200% of the norm because they reiki the car as part of the repair, the insurance company can refuse to pay the excess.
Rental car costs are well within the direct losses, although they normally don’t apply until either the car is in the shop or if it was unsafe to drive as a result of the accident.
And for @doreen’s example, yes. I actually had a customer drive into the side of the building, but we didn’t actually get into the nitty details, because the poor SOB carried California state minimums for property damage, which was a pathetic $5k in property damage. We looked at the damages, shook our heads, and wrote a check to the other party for the 5k and said “we’ve maxed the policy, you will have to contact him directly for anything else”.
Like I said, I didn’t mean offense by it. But the OP should have gotten much more assertive long ago. Having ones car tied up that long and not be provided a rental is unacceptable.
So would you agree that if an insurer had a contract which said “we will cover your liability for personal and property damage to the other party but this shall not include the loss of use of their vehicle”, that they are not on the hook for a rental car?
In an at-fault state, I don’t think it’s usually the case that an insurer can seek to limit their liability in this manner. The only choice the policy holder will have with respect to third party liability is the total dollar amount, which will be subject to statutory minimums.
Where you have a menu of choices in a policy such deductible size or rental car coverage, that applies to what you will get from your policy. If a third party is harmed, liability coverage (in principle) pays their actual damages.
Broke this into two different posts because it was bookish.
So to this point, please remember that the other party’s insurance work for them, not for you. Depending on the carrier and the adjuster, than can be more or less helpful/scummy, but they do have a contractual obligation to their own customer. If said customer doesn’t report or denies, they can only go with the physical evidence on hand.
Now, when I handled third-party claims, I would in generally be calling my client every 2-3 days at all listed contact numbers trying to get the information, because the faster I investigated, the faster the claim finished which was of course, a metric. But no matter how ‘open and shut’ the reported loss was, I still couldn’t do squat for the third party without that information.
And in a world of identity theft, this is a good thing. It’s not perfect, but it’s not a perfect world. And that leaves out stolen cars, non-permissive drivers, and worst, excluded drivers. I did have a claim where the driver was the policy owner’s excluded husband, excluded because he had 2 DUIs and a suspended license. He of course, just handed over the insurance docs to the person he hit and then tried to deny it ever happened.
So we confirmed the new damage to the car, advised the third party we were investigating, and had to wait for the police report, which confirmed it all. But sadly that meant no coverage - which I had previously contacted the third party’s insurance company about ahead of time as a likely scenario.
Another sadly common scenario where they won’t pay out ever with clear fault AND admission is a coverage limit issue. In a multi car accident, if my customer had hit you and drove you into 3 other vehicles, I wouldn’t be able to pay out because my customer likely didn’t have enough coverage for all the loss. At which point, it had (per the applicable law) to payout in ratio to the limits of the policy for all those losses.
So I had to wait until all those other vehicles were repaired and the losses confirmed, and pay out whatever equal percentage I could up to the limits of the policy.
So yeah, it gets complicated, but these were far less frequent edge cases.
If that were the contract, then yes. But insurance policies for personal auto are very highly regulated, and the third party portion (your liability to others) is usually standard for any basic limits policy in a state.
If you buy more than the minimum required insurance, their can be more flexibility in what the excess covers (although I’ve rarely seen that, but it would be legal in most states) and there is quite a lot of flexibility in what the first party insurance (what the insurance will pay directly to the person who bought to policy) will cover. But even there, there are often some basic requirements and a fixed menu of options allowed by the state. The states want the public to be able to understand what they are buying, compare costs, etc.
Depends on the no-fault state. And I only had my P&C license for 18, which are now lapsed. In most no-fault states, they concentrate on medical costs, with the liability limits only being applicable for the deductible at most, so yes, in those states, if you have no rental coverage, you’re out of pocket for it all.
Yes, but most insurance contracts are pretty bog standard, and that would be very much an outlier, from a creepy fly by night company that was probably out of business within a year. Now a related issue would be ‘self-insured’ individuals, who rather than carry insurance, post a bond with a state to the minimums. They don’t have insurance in the normal sense, but have posted sufficient funds for the state to consider them reasonable drivers.
Oh absolutely - but what I’m talking about was a little different. They would not go by the physical evidence. They would not even look at the physical evidence. What they told me ( and my insurance company confirmed ) is that their insured did not report any accident, and they were only obligated to cover her liability if she reported the accident to them. It had nothing to do with proof - it had to do with what the policy required the insured to do. Which is why she reported the accident once I served her with the small claims action - because if she didn’t report it and she lost in court, the insurance company would not have covered her liability.
