Liability for Additional Drivers in California
Posted on | December 11, 2009 | No Comments
In the state of California, you must have auto liability insurance. That applies to every driver in your household. If someone who lives in your house drives your car and gets into an accident, the insurance company will not pay the claim unless they have insurance.
California requires that every driver have liability insurance. The minimum level of coverage to be legal is $15,000 for medical expenses for one occupant and $30,000 for 2 or more occupants of the other vehicle, and $5000 for property damage including car repair. Note that these figures pertain only to the other car. If you want to protect your own assets, you will need additional coverage.
Additionally, you should know that if you do not have liability insurance, the California Department of Motor Vehicles will suspend your license for a year. You will also be personally liable for any injury or damage done to the other car if you get in an accident.
If the person in your household has their own vehicle and their own insurance, you will not have to put them on your insurance. However, if they get into an accident in your car, their own insurance policy will have to cover them.
You should know that additional driver insurance protects someone only when they are driving your cars. They don’t have insurance to cover them in other people’s cars.
Your insurance premiums will go up when you add an additional driver to your policy. The amount of the increase depends on several factors including the age of the driver, their driving record, and increasingly their credit score.
Adding a teenaged driver will make the family’s insurance premiums skyrocket, much to many parent’s dismay. However, if the student has good grades, it helps. If an additional driver has tickets or an accident, it will increase the policy rates as well. Finally, insurance companies are increasingly looking at credit scores as their actuaries have found a correlation between bad credit and high risk driving.
You should make sure that every driver in your household has insurance whether it is their own policy your yours. If not, lending your car to them for a quick errand could turn out to be quite expensive.
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