A question about Auto Insurance Coverage

If I am married and my wife crashes the car, would both of our insurance rates go up? or just the drivers? and if I were not married and someone else was driving my car and crashed it, what would most likely happen in that scenario? just curious..

-Doug

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If you and your spouse are on the same policy (which you most certainly should be), then your insurance coverage rate will go up with her rate. If you are on separate policies, I am not sure. If you are insured with two different insurance companies, perhaps your insurance coverage rates would not go up.

However, you may want to be on the same policy for auto insurance coverage because you want to make sure your Under insured Motorist and Uninsured Motorist coverage is stacked, and this can generally only be done (under current Pennsylvania law), if you insure your vehicles under one auto insurance coverage policy. This is called inter policy stacking v. intra policy stacking. Most insurance companies now insert a "family exclusion" into their policies that prevents intra policy stacking. The original purpose was to enable insurance companies to avoid having to pay benefits to teen drivers, i.e. the teen is rated separately and won't benefit by the parents' Under insured Motorist and Uninsured Motorist coverage. I think this is a travesty and somewhat deceptive in that insurers are selling two or more single vehicle policies to families where all or both policies provide stacked coverage but there is nothing to stack because of a "family exclusion" that is buried in the policy. Thus, the face sheet (dec page) of the policy appears to provide "stacked Under insured Motorist coverage" but the hidden language within the policy prevents you from stacking the Under insured Motorist coverage for the vehicles in your household.

Again, I find this to be deceptive. Nevertheless, thus far our courts have approved family exclusions.

-Ben

If you have any further questions regarding this type of auto accident or insurance coverage matter, I would invite you to contact me at the Mayerson Law firm.

Ben Mayerson-Your personal injury attorney in Pennsylvania