According to a Farmer’s Insurance commercial, they covered the claim where a truck fell through the ice while the driver was going ice fishing.
I have to wonder about that. Driving on ice seems like very risky behavior, done solely at the driver’s discretion, without any ‘official’ safety regulations.
I can see my insurance agent: “Lessee, you drove out on the ice with a 5000 lb vehicle and fell through, and you want us to buy you a new truck?” Que hysterical laughter in the office. “I don’t think so.”
I guess it depends on whether a company wants to sell insurance in the ice fishing areas of the country. If one company doesn’t want to cover pick’em up trucks parked on lakes, another company will.
This. There may be specific exclusions written into a standard automotive insurance policy, i.e. they won’t cover you if you crash while using the vehicle for racing (they may define “racing” more specifically as any driving in which you’re keeping track of time, or laps around a closed course, or even any driving on a closed track). But if there’s no written exclusion for driving on the ice - even if it’s been 45 degrees out for the past week and a half - then they don’t get to just pull policy rules out of thin air after the fact.
You may well get your policy non-renewed for pulling a boneheaded move like driving on ice when the temps have been 45 for a week, but it would be a rare policy that has a written exclusion for boneheaded moves, and if it is not excluded, the company gets to cover it.
Happens around here more than it should and, yes, insurance covers it. I think they will also cover the cost of retrieving it. As said above, the company then has the option to dramatically raise your rates or drop you if they are so inclined.
Yep. On Valentine’s day my dad got bogged down in snow and he pushed the engine of his car so hard trying to free it from the snow that it caught on fire. Like, a big fire. The car was totaled, and the insurance company paid for it.
The state DNR will require the owner to recover the vehicle and get it out of the lake. Pollution hazard.
In the 50s, there were several hundred ice fishing cars on Wisconsin’s Lake Winnebago when the ice sheet separated and they could not get their cars back to shore. The fishermen were rescued, but could then only wait to see what happened. Luckily, it refroze before spring, and as I recall, everyone got their cars back off the lake. In those days I was out ice fishing every week, and I’ve seen cars go through the ice.
Great Lakes ferries in Michigan and Ontario stop running when it freezes, and commuters just drive on the ice then until the water reopens. Usually about a week of transition time when you can’t get acrossl. There are always a few cars that go through the ice, sometimes fatally.
There can be exclusions specifically for driving on ice, but that would be clearly spelled out in the policy. Most likely, so long as one isn’t racing on the ice or driving on the ice in the hopes of falling through (insurance fraud), it would be a covered loss.
If you have a good policy, you are fine; which I guess is the point of the commercial. Cheaper/non-comprehensive policies and it can become a crap shoot.