This concurs with my experience renting a car in Germany, and finding a ding on the exterior that appeared when it was parked. That proved to be expensive, because repairing panels is expensive. Insurance that came with the credit card used to rent the car ended up covering it.
If I had to guess… she was probably an excluded driver on the policy. Happens (frequently) in a household where there’s a driver with access to the vehicle but who has a terrible driving record. The policyholder swears to the carrier on a stack of bibles (metaphorically) that the other person will never drive it, and the carrier agrees they won’t rate on that persons driving record… but if they DO, for ANY reason, the coverage is null and void, like what happened in your case.
What happens after? Well, your carrier probably subrogated against the driver, but if they don’t have any assets, well… in most states, the good news is that your carrier has an obligation to repay you first of your DED before they pay their own costs, so if you never got it back, you can guess. Or it could have been something else.
If the sister didn’t report it stolen (or if it was sister’s boyfriend’s car for example from the registration), before or after the fact… someone probably got dropped HARD by their carrier, and depending on circumstances, may have a “gave falsified information to carrier / attempted to commit insurance fraud” in their history. Not a good experience. Especially if it was financed vehicle and the lienholder starts getting involved in why there’s suddenly no coverage.
What was funny to me those many years ago, and it’s come up in other threads (on dealership and crappy service) is how MUCH of those costs are labor. Twelvish years ago, when I was doing this, it was around $75 per hour or MORE even with partners. I’d bed at least half again that much now. The last time I personally was in an accident (not my fault) the college age kid just wanted to do it out of pocket, and the damage was indeed minor, but I explained that even a real minor repair was going to be one to two grand, not the few hundred he expected. So we documented, exchanged info, and I turned out to be spot on, especially when they couldn’t get a like quality (my car was older) bumper and had to do a newish one. And a rental for 3 days…
It all adds up so fast, and people rarely have an idea of what the costs are going to be when they start offering deals or person-to-person repairs.
Of course, if it’s your car (not a rental) and you don’t mind that your old car has a visible ding, you can repair it very cheaply with a spot of touch-up paint. I generally keep cars line enough that their sale value is based on “does it still run?”, not on how shiny the panels are.
Exactly! I don’t rent a car often because I only rent a car when I fly to a place where I’m going to need transportation, but I always get that added coverage because I don’t want headaches like that. It’s worth the thirty or forty dollars more for the peace of mind it gives.
I think the cut-off is whether you could expect a collision/comprehensive policy to cover it on your own car. Not whether it would be worth it to file a claim if that was the only damage but whether collision/comprehensive would cover the antenna if it was part of the damage when your parked car was hit by another car. Which is going to be pretty much any damage that isn’t caused by wear and tear or lack of maintenance.
Reviving this thread because something similar happened to me in a Turo rental car in Alaska. (We went with Turo because summer rates during tourist season for conventional rental cars in Alaska are outrageous.)
Shortly into the trip, we heard a rubbing noise while driving and saw that the plastic fender liner inside the passenger side front wheel well was loose. It was clearly pre-existing because much of the plastic was already worn away. We put a piece of tape on it so it didn’t get any worse. We were in a remote area with no cell phone service, so we didn’t report it to the owner (a mistake in retrospect), but didn’t worry about it at the time because it seemed minor and the vehicle had 140K miles on it.
But when we returned the vehicle, the owner did notice, and said we must have hit something and wanted us to pay to fix for their car’s preexisting issue. We countered by saying that one of the “before” photos the owner had taken clearly showed a hole in the plastic from where it had already been rubbing against the tire. The owner then said we must have made it worse, and were at fault for not reporting it.
We ultimately settled for $100 with the owner, which seemed like the best option considering that we were being faulted for not reporting the issue. If it had gone to Turo for arbitration we could have been on the hook for considerably more.
But it definitely soured me on the whole Turo experience.
After the above experience with Turo, and another experience last year where I got nailed for 250 Euros in Greece for scraping a wall with a rental car, I am much more inclined to get the optional insurance.
You’re the insurance expert here but I’ll just add a sidebar to this based on personal experience, and as a caution to others. Obviously, coverage of a non-owned vehicle is subject to that coverage being part of your policy, which in many cases it isn’t. But I’m talking about a more subtle distinction. The policy of my insurance company, at least – and I imagine this is quite common – has a whole bunch of legalese relating to the contract you have for the non-owned vehicle. So sure, it applies to a rental car if you declined their own coverage. But if you just borrow a friend’s car and some sort of damage happens – nope! You’re out of luck.
Back when my mechanic used to have free loaners, he made me sign a form stating that I was responsible for any damage. Little did I realize that this contractual arrangement protected me as much as it did him.
I went through this years ago when I was in the process of buying a car from a friend. I drove it home but had not yet transferred the ownership or insurance (and in fact probably not even paid for it yet). That very night there was a freak hailstorm that damaged a lot of cars including that one.
I tried to get coverage and was denied, because coverage for a non-owned vehicle did not apply in this case. I spoke with a supervisor who re-affirmed the denial, and further stated that strict adherence to policy rules was fundamental to how insurance companies worked.
I finally escalated the case to the insurance company ombudsman, arguing that this was an unusual case in which the car, though technically not mine, was effectively mine as all the arrangements had been made for me to buy it. In the end, the ombudsman agreed with me, but it was quite the effort!
I don’t mind, and in fact endorse the caution. Each carrier has differences, some minor, some major, and has clauses, exceptions, and limitations to coverage. So, as in just about any contract law, reading the fine print is a great idea!
I feel that I should add a couple of points of clarity to my previous post. When @ParallelLines states that “in general when your coverage transfers to a non-owned vehicle, it works exactly like it does on an owned vehicle” I’m sure they’re perfectly correct and I’m not disputing that at all. My auto insurance policy pretty much states exactly that.
My caution was that my take-away from my experience was that insurers will cover you for a non-owned vehicle only to the extent of your contracted liability for such vehicle. If you have no contracted liability, or no non-owned vehicle coverage at all, then you wouldn’t have coverage – at least according to my experience.
Clearly, the insurance ombudsman coming around to my side was based on the fact that I had the optional non-owned vehicle endorsement. It was not the fact that it was “almost mine, but not really” which would cause any insurance company to laugh at you. IANAL, but I strongly suspect it was solely the fact that my commitment to purchase the vehicle constituted an implied contract that made me liable for any damages and therefore should be covered under the “non-owned vehicle” endorsement.
But again, IANAL, I’m just relating what happened.
How would it have been different if you had just borrowed the car? Does it require an optional “non-owned vehicle endorsement” to cover a borrowed vehicle?
Thinking about it, I guess with borrowed vehicles the insurance coverage is usually under the owner. So in your case, if your insurance company had not relented, it seems like it should have been covered by the friend’s insurance since they still technically owned the vehicle. Hopefully they hadn’t dropped coverage yet (nor should they until the sale went through).
Insurance on rentals can be fraught with problems. When we went to Portugal, I researched the subject and ended up with a policy from a UK company, rather than using the (expensive) rental company’s deal. Doing it in advance gave me the ability to read the small print at my leisure
The downside of this is that I could have needed to pay any costs out of pocket before recovering them from the insurer. I did also become aware of a scam operated by the cheaper rental companies. If you return the car after hours, they will claim for damage to the wheels or some other minor damage. This only appears on your credit card after you go home, so it is difficult to dispute.
My father’s insurance, yes. My insurance, no. We live about ten minute walk from each other and both replaced cracked windshields within six months of each other last year. He paid nothing, I shelled out a $200 deductible.
So, highly variable.
This is correct, and they indeed still had insurance and that was my first recourse. The problem was that they didn’t have comprehensive coverage whereas I did. But yes, the typical answer to coverage for a borrowed vehicle is that the owner’s insurance provides coverage.
This was a really bizarre situation in that you can’t normally have two different parties insuring the same vehicle, nor can you normally insure something you don’t own or formally have no interest in. I think they basically agreed to coverage as a goodwill gesture to a longtime client.
Apparently it also depends on who does the replacement. There appears to be some underhanded stuff going on here. Years ago I went to a windshield replacement place and I remember talking to my insurance agent on their phone and being told that, sorry, your deductible applies, and if the entire cost of replacement is less than the deductible, well, sucks to be you. The person behind the counter at the windshield place overheard this conversation and suddenly exclaimed, “no, no .-- give me the phone!”. She then turned away and said some magic words. I don’t know what those magic words were, but in the end I paid nothing for the replacement – insurance covered it all.
I had a rental car when my truck was in the body shop. A stone hit the rental windshield and made a star crack. Rather than have the rental company charge me whatever they had the nerve to charge me, I took it to a windshield shop and had them inject the crack. I think it was around $50 and the car rental company was none the wiser.
Speaking to @wolfpup’s earlier point, in most states and policies, coverage for damage on a non-owned vehicle defaults to the owner’s coverage first, and then only secondarily (such as a total lack of COMP/COLL) to the drivers. Again, your fine print and state may be different!
This one could be hinky, but probably not. Most carriers have very PPO like coverage. They have in-network repair shops, and preferred servicers. As I said earlier, if you take it out of network, they’ll dicker, but if they find your chosen shop is outside the “customary and usual” prices, they can pay out at that rate and you pay the excess. In my experience, most repair shops knew how it worked, and compromises were almost always reached (my experience, with my employer YMMV!).
Glass is exactly the same way. The two companies I worked for/with partnered with Safelite. If you had a glass only claim, it went entirely through them, we didn’t touch it. And generally repairable work was free, and replacements were done at “in-network” costs, often though being below the deductible.
If, in your example, the windshield guy wasn’t part of their network, but told the agent he was familiar with the pricing guidelines for that carrier and agreed to do the work at that point, they probably just approved it. Same as if a non-network body shop said “I know you guys only approve $75/hr for labor, we’ll hold to that”.
Again, my assumption of what the magic words likely were.
Just to add a bit here:
I spoke to my insurance agent and he said that - on my policy at least - Turo is not considered a covered rental car agency and was excluded from insurance coverage.
Likewise for the rental car insurance that comes with your credit card. (Chase sapphire preferred). They do not cover damage on Turo rentals.