What happens if you want to go to work driving for a ride-service company like Sidecar or UberX and try to get insurance up front? What happens to your policy if your insurance company finds out you're driving passengers for hire? Will your insurance pay your claim if you have a fender-bender while driving for a ride service?
I'd love to give you definitive, black-and-white answers to all those questions. But the truth is in a gray area. My reporting and stories done by others suggest insurance companies aren't crazy about covering you if you're driving for a ride service, though I did find one driver who said he had no problem with coverage or filing claims.
Josh Wolf, a Lyft driver, wrote about his experience trying to get insurance in the San Francisco Bay Guardian last summer. He related this anecdote:
(A)t least one person has been told by her insurance company that she will be dropped unless she obtains a notarized letter from Lyft saying she won't be driving for it anymore.
The trouble began for this driver, who spoke on condition of anonymity, when she got into a minor fender bender while driving a passenger in March."The guy whose car I bumped into was the neighbor of my passenger," said the driver. "I never heard anything else from Geico for the longest time so I was sort of hoping that it didn't have an effect on my coverage, but then at the end of June I got the questionnaire in the mail."
A month later Geico told her that she'd be dropped from her insurance at the end of July unless she can demonstrate that she's no longer driving for Lyft. Geico said that if she couldn't get a letter from Lyft, she could send a notarized letter herself and the company "might take it under consideration."
A spokesperson for the Insurance Information Network of California told Wolf that, “An insurer may even decide to non-renew your policy for failing to notify them of your business.”
Dan, a Lyft driver I talked to for this series, says, "I have heard about people being denied coverage because it was discovered they were driving for Lyft, and therefore their personal insurance policy would not be renewed, or canceled."
I asked Kara Cross of the Personal Insurance Federation of California if this was happening — insurers canceling the policies of TNC drivers once they got wind of their shuttling people around for money. She said she hadn’t heard of any such incidents. And a Lyft driver I spoke to who got into an accident last year told us he had no problem renewing his personal insurance in August. “I think it depends on what agent you have,” he says.