Ethics when your kid wrecks another person's car

In My Humble Opinion
21

She didn’t have five wrecks so far. The OP stated that she already had five moving violations which just means tickets for anything from speeding to reckless driving. Both of them are clearly poor drivers judging by the evidence at hand. Black ice can make conditions more difficult but that is just a sign that you need to stay off the road if you and your vehicle cannot handle it. It is never a pass for wrecking a car because it means the driver made a bad judgement call.

That is nothing surprising about that. Teenagers can be extremely dangerous drivers. The parents should be thankful that they both weren’t killed. Some casual members of my Facebook account weren’t so lucky a few months ago. A boyfriend missed a sharp curve on a Saturday night with girlfriend sitting right next to him. Neither one of them were wearing a seatbelt. Trees don’ really care about the finer points of the law. They were both ejected from the vehicle. He was killed instantly and she died the next day. I cannot even begin to count how many young people I have known that have killed themselves in similar circumstances.

It is very tragic but you have to take full responsibility if you get behind the wheel of a two-ton vehicle moving at great speed. Anything can happen but I never want to hear anyone claim that a single vehicle accident is not the ultimate fault of the driver. Of course it is. If you can’t accept that responsibility, you shouldn’t be driving in the first place. The same thing goes for planes, boats, ATV’s and every other type of potentially dangerous machinery.

22

Pssst - your strawman is showing.

Call your insurance agent if you don’t believe me. When you lend your car to someone you (and by extension your insurance) are liable for any accidents they are in.

And if you want to argue “well, that’s the law, this is ethics and it’s different” then consider this; the girlfriend is a terrible driver. She has numerous tickets and is asking her boyfriend to drive because she herself cannot “assume total command of the vehicle” etc and according to your logic “isn’t qualified to have a driver’s license.” She knows that bad shit happens when she drives so she asks him to. She apparently doesn’t want to be seen in hey boyfriend’s beater car though, so she specifically asks him to drive her car. Is it ethical to throw someone on your own grenade under the guise of a simple favor? Is it reasonable to place an unrelated and unsuspecting third party (his parents) at the far end of a Rube Goldberg chain of unilaterally presumed (yet unspoken and legally unfounded) indemnity?

Can her parents still ask? Sure! Based on context it’ll be a very loaded question and they’ll look tacky, especially if they persist, but they can ask.

23

You are right, I misread it. Five tickets.

Regardless my concern is that the scope of his mistake should not be exacerbated because of her previous mistakes. It is reasonable for him to cover the deductible. If her parents want to keep it from the insurance company then they can cover after that, that is their choice.

I would love to see insurance follow driver primarily, but that isn’t the way it works for reasons I won’t claim to know. If it were that way than the young man would pay based on his driving record, which seems reasonable.

His being required to pay more because of her driving history just doesn’t seem right, and I think the law kinda falls that way in this case.

24

He should pay the deductible and his parents should pay nothing. If the girl’s parents don’t want to pay the increased insurance, they can take that up with her. Maybe she should take a break from having a car before she kills someone.

25

This why people have insurance. Now, I don’t know what the details are. I do know that I was once driving someone’s car, and I wrecked it, on ice. Technically it was not even that bad a wreck. I slid into a guardrail. A highway patrolman on the other side of the highway watched the whole thing, turned around to come to our aid, and did not give me a ticket, although he did give me a lecture on how it can be 42 degrees and drizzling and still be icy on an overpass, which I had already just learned.

Now it turned out that her insurance was not comprehensive enough to pay what she owed on the car, and yet her insurance deemed the car totaled, and the insurance I had (for my car) ended up paying.

But she had to sue me in order for that to happen. It was a crazy mess.* Of course it resulted in increased rates for me, and it was all down to her being underinsured in the first place.

But I ended up not out of pocket for anything (except I had to buy a dress to wear to court, because I didn’t have a dress at that time and you couldn’t wear pants to court in the state if you were female). And then they settled before the “trial” which was, as far as I can tell, total legal theater, but the process at the time.

Anyway…if the parents want to and can afford to pay out $3K for this, that would work. If it’s going to be some kind of strain, let the insurance companies deal with it and let the parents deal with the increased rates, by passing them along to their irresponsible daughter. Who will keep doing shit until they do.

(I was also in college at the time, but over 18. My mother never heard a word about this wreck. Her parents didn’t hear about it until she drove home in the car she bought after she paid off the much better car I had totaled.)

*The craziest thing was that the insurance attorney said it would be best if I had nothing to do with her, not even to speak to her, because then it would look like some kind of collusion. She was my ROOMMATE. I think there was some collusion, but it wasn’t my collusion.

26

The reason that insurance follows the car is because that is the element that doesn’t change. If it followed the driver and one day I drive an old Hyundai, but the next day I’m driving someone’s brand new Mercedes, how do they determine my rate?

The girl’s parents need to pay up and then they need to take her keys away. That should have been done after her second ticket, since she obviously isn’t mature enough to be driving her own car.

27

One other more practical than ethical consideration is that different insurance companies handle accidents with non-listed drivers differently. I’m not so sure a crippling rate hike/cancellation is quite as certain in this situation as M’s parents seem to think. It’s possible that they might not hold the accident against M (or at least not as much as if she had been driving) but will require that C be explicitly excluded from the policy in the future.

28

It’s interesting that this thread has covered all the points in the discussion we had yesterday with C’s father. It’s not a cut-and-dried situation.

FYI, C and M both live in Ohio. C’s father’s position (let’s call him R) is that C is 100% responsible for the accident. He wrecked the car. So even though he truly cannot afford it, R is going to pay the $3k and C is going to pay him back over time.

I, personally, thought that it would be fairer for C to pay the deductible, or if they want to be nice, split it. Obviously C is at fault for wrecking the car. M is at fault for letting someone else drive her car, and for getting so many tickets that she’s on the verge of losing her driver’s license and insurance, which is why she wasn’t behind the wheel.

IMO, they all pay good money to buy insurance so that the maximum any of them will be out is the deductible (in this case $1000). Covering accidents like this is what insurance is for. The fact that M’s parents don’t want to involve insurance, because of M’s crappy driving record, isn’t C’s fault. I’ve got no issues with making C paying the deductible. But for him to fork over the entire $3k, while she pays nothing, seems unfair. IMO, they were both at fault and they both need to feel pain, if for no other reason than to reinforce that they need to slow down before they kill someone.

Anyway, that’s why I think that, at worst, they should split it down the middle. C’s father adamantly, violently disagrees with me. He practically accused me of being a bad person for saying that I’d come back with an offer to pay half. He kept saying, “C was DRIVING. He wrecked their care. I don’t care about the law. I’m talking ETHICS.”

So I said, “ETHICALLY, C did the right thing by having insurance. The fact that they don’t want to involve insurance isn’t his fault.”

“Then he shouldn’t have been driving their car.”

So I asked, “What if the car had been a luxury car and the damages were $5,000, or $10,000. Do you think that C should have had to personally pay back 10 grand to fix their car?”

“Well, no. Then we’d have to involve the insurance.”

“Why? What happened to your ethics?”

“My ethics are that I don’t have 10 grand. I do have 3 grand.”

“So basically the ethics of the situation change, based on the driver’s father’s bank account. That makes sense.”

Interesting discussion. So glad it’s not my child. (Knocking on wood.) I appreciate everyone’s responses because it reinforces how people can come up with very different answers, and all of them are understandable.

29

Recent auto liability adjuster here:
In most (all?) states car insurance follows the vehicle. I know for sure it does in California. The driver’s insurance would then be excess to the vehicle’s. So if the car he was driving didn’t have collision coverage then his would kick in.

In a situation like this it does not matter what the vehicle owners want to do. An insurance company will not pay if they find out there’s another insurance company who is on the hook.

Her rates may not increase because she wasn’t the driver, although don’t quote me on that. I didn’t do underwriting.
Personally, I’d pay the deductible and be done with it.

30

So does that actually make sense to you? Or is that sarcasm?

I think your example of an expensive car is key to sussing out the “correct” course of action. I own a car without collision coverage because, for that crappy car, it’s cheaper to replace it outright than pay the premiums. I regularly let people drive it, and I tell them up front that I don’t have collision coverage, and if they wreck it they’re going to have to help me fix it. I don’t have any authority to enforce this rule but if I get screwed on the deal I’m not going to suffer too much financially.

If anyone wrecks my other car, the one that I do have collision coverage on, I’m filing an insurance claim. It might be nice if they paid the deductible, but that’s up to them. It’s not like I inform them of my deductible prior to handing them the keys, so they can’t exactly make an informed decision. I think it’s $1000, if they want to pay it I’d appreciate it it but I wouldn’t think it was obligatory.

If I refused to file an insurance claim for whatever reason, that’s on me. Maybe there’s only $1500 in damage and I’d rather pay a little more not to have it in my file, in which case I’d still appreciate if they paid me the $1000 “deductible.” But if it’s $5000 in damages and I stubbornly refuse to use the insurance that I have for this exact purpose, I don’t see what grounds I have to demand that they pay for all the damages.

31

This.

In the OP’s case, C is liable for M’s deductible, plus maybe a bit for incidental & consequential damages. Nobody else has the right to choose for their own reasons to keep this from the insurance companies & simply foist the costs of their decision onto C.

IMO C’s Dad is getting it wrong out of that funny pride of the middle class: He’s simultaneously proud that he has the $3K to cover the situation, and that he lacks the $10K to cover the hypothetical.

32

Clarence can send it to Madeline’s* insurance company without the vehicle owner’s permission. All he needs to do is file a claim with his company and then they’ll submit a claim on Clarence’s behalf.
*I loathe single letters for name. It makes it difficult for me to parse, so I just gave them names.

33

That is what insurance is for. If C is insured he should turn it over to his insurance first. And make good any expense the owners of the car are out. If C did not have insurance then he should not have been driving and should make good the expense.

My daughter in law was in an accident while driving my truck. My son’s insurance paid for the damage to the other car.

34

This.

35

If C was driving, then he’s responsible for the damage to the car. He need to submit it to his insurance company, or pay out of pocket. There’s no question here.

36

Disagree (to a degree). As others have said, M asked C to drive, and asked that he drive her car. Some, possibly a lot, of the financial responsibility of the accident is on M. If C insisted on using her car then the situation would be different.

37

This is not generally the way insurance works. And do you really think that people who are good, licensed drivers, but don’t own cars, thus have nothing to insure, should never drive any vehicle? That obviously doesn’t fly.

38

Also, buy the kid some condoms.

39

This should not make one bit of difference, she didn’t force him to drive, he engaged in it willingly. She rightly chone not to drive, he didn’t. Also, unless PunditLisa left out details, she also wasn’t sharing the wheel when he hit the ice. His accident, his responsibility.

40

According to the insurance company, Clarence has no repsonsibility whatsoever for the deductible. Or anything, really. Even if he insisted on driving. Heck, even if he went to the grocery store without her in the car he still wouldn’t have any obligation to pay.