I’m looking for guidance on how to find a commercial auto insurer to cover my manual transmission car as I rent it out to students (for money). This is assuming my regular insurance won’t cover me.
Justification:
In the last few months I’ve started teaching manual driving lessons through two companies. It’s a “gig” business model, where the companies provide insurance, marketing, and booking, and I get a flat fee per lesson. Lessons start at $300 for a 3 hour time block and go up from there, but the expectation is that students book a single lesson, I teach them as much as I possibly can in that time period, and then that’s it – no repeat customers.
The problem, of course, is that 3 hours is a long time. Legs get tired, brains get tired. Learning to drive a stick takes about 30 minutes, I can stretch it to an hour, and then the rest of the time is just practice. Time that would be better spent doing distributed practice over the course of a couple weeks. Let the brain rest, let the reg rest, etc. IME it’s really hard to get proficient at driving a stick if you do it once in a while, but if you do it every day for 2 weeks you’re set.
I’m permitted by these companies’ terms to advertise myself, but only if I direct customers to them for booking. Since I’ve signed up with multiple companies, this isn’t really an option. But my idea is that I have a captive customer in the car for 3 hours, who at some point will realize that they’re not going to become fluent after 2-3 hours. I’d like to be able to give them a card with a website where they can book time to just rent my car (similar to Turo, but hourly). I figure at that point I’ve already vetted whether or not I feel comfortable taking them out without me. I can meet them in a public location, give them a quick refresher, and then they can go drive around for an hour. If they do this 2 or 3 times it’s really going to help reinforce the learning.
I’m not going to get rich doing this, but it’s fairly low impact for me – I have a spare car and can walk to the drop-off point.
So, I’ve never done anything like this and I’m not even sure where to start. Do I just cold-call independent insurance providers? How do I find a good one?