It’s not a good thing if the insured bought the insurance with the understanding that his passengers would be covered in the event of injury. The passengers in this case were not just greedy profiteers looking for a windfall, but family friends that my mother felt responsibility for. The point is, she did not want to avoid liability for their injuries, she wanted the insurance they had purchased with the understanding that their passengers would be covered, to pay what was contracted for. For the insurance company and their lawyers to tell her, “don’t worry they don’t have a leg to stand on”, is a callous and morally repugnant view.
I guess you answered the question. Thanks.
It was my understanding that just because you are on the road or have placed your car where it can be hit you are at least somewhat responsible (10%?). If you are stopped at a light and get rear ended is the hitters insurance fully responsible for all damages or can it be argued that if you werent at the light you wouldnt have got rear ended? And how would this extend to the dead guy - if he hadn`t got in the car that day he would not have died in it.
How would this work
Say the guy died and his car came to complete stop on the freeway and he got rear ended buy someone else.
How would that mess be straightened out? How can the exact time of death be determined? Maybe he had severe chest pains and the actuall heart stopped after he came to a complete stop and was rear ended.
Or to address the OP, maybe the guy lost control of the car clenching his chest and didn`t actually croak till after the accident.
I think the right way to handle this is to assume the dead driver`s insurance is liable until the car comes to a complete stop, NO?
Glad I could help.
Your second paragraph raises a good question. Its complete answer requires a discussion of the negligence element that I deliberately avoided in my earlier post - proximate cause. The short answer is, no, neither the dead guy or the person stopped at the light are legally responsible in any way. Neither acted unreasonable or wrongfully. Even if they did do something arguably wrong in the chain of events leading up to the accident, that act would lead to liability only if it were a proximate (reasonably direct) cause of the accident.
For example, if your hypothetical stopped driver had been speeding earlier, he did something wrong, and if he hadn’t been speeding, he wouldn’t have been stopped at that particular light (he would have been some distance behind) and therefore wouldn’t have been struck by the other car that rear-ended him.
His earlier speeding, however, was not a direct or immediate (proximate) cause of the accident, and is therefore legally irrelevant. (Proximate does not always exclude events remote in time. Let’s say that an auto repair place screwed up a brake repair on the car that caused the accident, and that brake failure contributed to the collision. Under some circumstances, that botched repair could be a proximate cause of the accident, even if it the repair happened months ago.)
I think I’ve answered the other (general) question pending. What remains would seem to be a Great Debate about what insurance should cover, not what it does cover.
Doesn’t matter, as long as the dead guy acted reasonably. If he was incapacitated by the heart attack, but was still alive when the collision occurs, he’s still not responsible, and neither is his insurer. (Yeah, I suppose we could come up with a fact pattern where he wasn’t sufficiently incapacitated to prevent him from avoiding the accident, which would leave him liable.)
I gotta do some paying work, so I’m going to bow out of this thread, at least for now.
RANDOM ------ THANKS for the info, cleared it up pretty well.