Heavy pain damage to rental/does insurance cover?
 

This isn't FRS directly but I know I would get more answers and quicker here and it's kind of an emergency so...
I have a friend who ran into the orange flappy things in between lanes and scraped the paint down to metal in some places and yanked off the drivers side mirror
She was using a loaner from Toyota while her car was being worked on under warranty.
She didn't rent the car they just gave her the keys and said they'll call her back when her car is done.
So the question is, is she liable for the damage? Does her insurance have to pay for the damage or does she just turn the car back in and that's it?

First off wrong forum


Second, each dealer has there own courtesy car policy, you have to check with them and if she signed anything. By her own admission this is her fault and it will most likely have to go through her policy or will have some clause at in some paperwork somewhere that says she needs to pay for the damage....

Best case scenario is they make her pay them whatever her deductible is.

Worst case, they draw up the paperwork for her brand new, slightly worn Corolla (or whatever).

Somewhere in the middle, they turn it in to her insurance to whom she pays the deductible and her rates go up.

Don't text and drive. If they just "gave" her the car, tell 'em it was like that when she got it.

Oh, I reckon that's up to the dealer and maybe her insurance company.

She will have to ask them.


humfrz

Im just posting to see the outcome

The answer is yes!

If she has full coverage on her car she is covered under her insurance.

Until they pull up the video of her driving an intact loaner car off their lot.

Yes. Why wouldn't she be? She damaged the car, right? So she's liable for the damage.

That depends on her policy. Most likely she would be covered under her own liability policy, but none of us can know that for sure.

Also, going back to the first question, even if the insurance company agrees to accept her liability for the damage, it's still ultimately her liability. The insurance company is simply agreeing to stand in for her.

She could try that if she's a dishonest person who doesn't own up to her mistakes and shirks her responsibility. If the dealership is so sloppy that they just hand out cars without a loaner contract and without getting her insurance information, they may be sloppy enough not to notice until it's too late to figure out where the damage came from.

But what's more likely to happen is that they'll demand her insurance information and file a claim against her liability coverage. If she refuses to give them her insurance information, they'll probably file the claim with their own insurance company instead, and then that company's subrogation department will find out her insurance info and sue her and/or her insurer to reimburse them for the claim, plus legal costs and expenses. Most likely the failure to report an accident of that type to her own insurer would invalidate her policy for that matter, so that they would simply refuse to accept responsibility for it, and the suit (and subsequent damages) would fall entirely on her. Oh, and if the dealer notices the damage before they release her own car back to her, they may refuse to give it back if she doesn't provide her insurance information for a claim.

Sure, that sounds like the way to go. Let us know how it turns out.

To be clear here, I told her to get it repaired on her dollar and don't get insurance involved. Somebody else who works in insurance told her to just turn it in as they expect damage to be there.
The whole mirror and the mirror cover were replaced, so that's is all new. The scratches can be buffed out mostly except since it was mostly the stuff rubbed off onto the car where it went into the metal a bit.
It all looked a lot worse at first and I've rented cars with the same kind of damage so maybe they will just not care like the other insurance person said?
No paperwork was done, it was just "here's a car and bring it back when we are done on your car" which was weird. She still has the car so I will fill in the ending when it happens.

Sounds like it's the official sacrificial loaner car. The one car that would get tossed around and never sell.

Either way sounds like the damage wasn't as bad.