Rental Car Liability Insurance Coverage – What is rental car insurance? Need to share our experience with different car rental insurance options?
The car rental booth where the rental agreement is signed and any additional liability and damage waivers offered by the rental car company.
Rental Car Liability Insurance Coverage
Chasing waterfalls usually means we have to go to places that aren’t well connected or as popular. So we usually have to rent (or rent) a car. However, when taking a rental car, we should consider whether to accept or decline the agency’s rental car insurance coverage. So it is natural to ask. Is it necessary? Are we cheaters or cheaters?
Do I Need Car Rental Insurance?
In fact, it’s one of the last things we want to think about when we’re about to pick up the car and start driving it. Not a pleasant thought, especially if we’ve flown far and are tired and don’t really want to think about it.
By the way, this also does not include the refundable deposit that we have to pay regardless of whether we buy additional car rental insurance (and after returning the rental car).
In this article, we answer these questions through the lens of our own life experiences. In fact, it turns out that it’s not so easy to get fired if you don’t want to be blindsided by unexpected expenses.
Rental car insurance is basically optional coverage that we can purchase through the rental car company. As you’ll see, this isn’t technically insurance. However, we’ll go with this term because it fulfills the promise of peace of mind that general insurance is theoretically supposed to provide.
Liability Car Insurance
Damage to the front grill and hood (or hood) of a rental car (or rental car) while traveling in Western Australia.
However, rental car insurance protects the rental car against loss or damage while we are in possession of it (ie from the time you leave the rental agency until you return it).
Of all these aspects of rental car coverage, loss damage liability (LDW) or collision damage liability (CDW) is the main one that rental car agencies try to promote.
We also pay more attention to paying extra for rental car insurance
What Are The Risks Of Liability Only Auto Insurance?
Technically, a rental agency’s “insurance” isn’t really insurance at all, because they add the car rental rate upfront, so no insurance company is actually involved at all.
The main idea behind buying a rental car (or any type of insurance in general) is to protect you in terms of compensation if something unexpected happens while driving a rental car.
Take a closer look at some of the bumper damage that was enough for the rental agency to charge us extra for it.
And with rental car insurance, an accident or damage must occur while driving the rental car.
Auto Rental Reimbursement Coverage
So in theory, buying rental car insurance (specifically CDW) from the rental car agency will at least allow us to return the rental car without any surprise fees.
I would imagine driving this type of 4wd on the road would be a contract violation for most rental cars.
For example, have we damaged the roads with four wheels? Hit the wildlife from dusk till dawn? Violation of traffic rules, which led to an accident.
However, without car rental insurance, we’ll face unexpected expenses (who knows how much) that we’ll have to pay ourselves. And it doesn’t matter whether the incident is our fault or not
Does Your Auto Insurance Cover Rental Cars?
With insurance policies that are not related to the rental car agency, we must file a claim and confirm with the insurer that the claim is legitimate.
Our experience with these claims processes is that they can be stressful, drawn-out (they usually take us at least two months) and a lot of hassle.
In fact, we have learned the hard way that generally the position of most insurance companies is to collect premiums and not pay claims.
This crack caused by a rock in our truck driving on I-15 from Utah is another example of the rental car agency blaming us if we don’t pay for the CDW.
Does My Car Insurance Cover A Rental Car?
Back to the rental car claim, most of the initial denials we’ve experienced are clerical in nature (like maybe something wasn’t clear in the paperwork they requested).
So we have to be both persistent and careful, and level-headed when trying to recover money from an insurer.
This is why I like to emphasize the hassle factor when trying to collect insurance claims, which are hassles that can be avoided by upfront “insurance” costs for the rental car agency.
Rental car insurance prices depend on how much we are willing to pay upfront to cover unexpected expenses caused by damage or injury to the rental car.
Rental Car Coverage And Travel Insurance
For collision damage waivers (CDW) or collision damage waivers (LDW), we’ve seen costs range from $12 to $40 per day. However, this price may increase as costs tend to increase over time
A sign that talks about the cost of accidental damage at a rental car agency we booked in Australia in June 2006.
So, considering that a rental can cost anywhere from about $30 to $100, this rental car insurance can double the total cost of the rental in CDW/LDW alone.
As for other insurance coverage options offered by rental car agencies, we did not actually purchase them at the rental desk or at checkout when booking online.
What Is Liability Car Insurance?
However, to give you an idea of how much these other covers cost, supplementary liability insurance (SLI) can cost around Rs 7 to Rs 20 per day.
Furthermore, personal accident insurance can be around $5 per day and personal exposure insurance can be around $4 per day.
Notice on this payment screen how the base price for a week’s rental is $228.22 USD, but the cost of insurance was $331.74 USD ($191.94 + $98.10 + $41.70), which was more than the basic the rental rate.
So you can see that all these extra rentals add up to the total cost of car insurance (possibly triple the original rental rate).
When To Say Yes To Rental Car Insurance
Since we are US citizens, our purchasing decision depends on whether we are renting a car in the US or renting a car internationally.
If we rent a car in the US, we usually let the rental car insurance through our credit card act as primary insurance and our “regular” auto insurance act as secondary insurance.
For example, when we rented a car in Buffalo, New York, we had a flat tire and were charged about $500 to replace the tire (if one was bad, they replaced the other too!) after we returned the tire. car
When we rent private cars, we drive on road trips as far north as Washington State (and even Canada), so a lot can go wrong on such a long trip.
Best Car Insurance Louisiana: Top Companies (2023)
Since our rental was paid for with a credit card that doesn’t offer rental car insurance (or maybe we didn’t know at the time), we couldn’t claim those costs back.
We also couldn’t make a claim against our general auto insurance policy because the value was discounted so it wasn’t even worth making a claim (more on that later).
Anyway, growing up in the US, we generally know and understand the rules of the road, so we rely on our credit card rental car insurance if something happens.
Regardless, our regular auto insurance will be more than what a credit card would pay if we were in a major collision.
Car Insurance Coverage Types
You never really appreciate how easy it is to damage a rental car until you have a situation like this crazy hailstorm we experienced in Wyoming.
We may prepay for CDW/LDW if we know we are driving in an area with a high risk of damage, such as unpaved roads (especially 4WD roads), if there is a lot of wildlife or even if the weather is bad. (eg (hail)
However, we have to read the fine print (not easy to do when you’re in the rental seat) to see if coverage will be voided if you drive on paved roads or in other conditions.
