USA Car Hire liability

simonx

HI there - I have hired a car from Alamo using Holiday Autos for a trip to California this weekend.
I have paid Holiday Autos an extra £33.32 for AXA Damage Refund Insurance. I am wondering if I should still purchase separate Car Hire Excess Insurance in case of serious accident e.g. being liable for one or more deaths in an accident (sorry to be morbid) which could create a multi-million dollar liability

simonx

I have checked with Holiday Autos, who say I have Third Party Cover/ Supplemental Liability Insurance (up to 1 million USD). For the USA that does not sound enough.

DullGreyGuy

simonx said:

HI there - I have hired a car from Alamo using Holiday Autos for a trip to California this weekend.
I have paid Holiday Autos an extra £33.32 for AXA Damage Refund Insurance. I am wondering if I should still purchase separate Car Hire Excess Insurance in case of serious accident e.g. being liable for one or more deaths in an accident (sorry to be morbid) which could create a multi-million dollar liability

Where are you getting that name for the product? What does it state it covers?

Looking at a random Alamo hire via Holiday Autos from SanFran airport its stating the hire comes with $0 CDW, $0 theft and $300k of TP cover. It did offer "USA Car Hire – Additional Cover" from Axa but this was breakdown, personal possessions etc. 

If you want to increase the third party liability cover you would by SLI, this can be purchased standalone or embedded in a Hire Excess policy but certainly what they are showing me there is no need for the Excess element. 

Note that SLI normally adds $1m of additional TP cover so if you are fearing a multi-million dollar claim you are only covered for the first $1.3m of it. 

simonx

Thanks @DullGreyGuy ... yes, "USA Car Hire – Additional Cover" from Axa is what I paid for, then on the rental voucher it displays as "AXA Damage Refund Insurance". So it seems I have SLI up to $1M - do (sensible) people purchase extra cover? What happens in multi-million dollar liability cases.

DullGreyGuy

simonx said:

Thanks @DullGreyGuy ... yes, "USA Car Hire – Additional Cover" from Axa is what I paid for, then on the rental voucher it displays as "AXA Damage Refund Insurance". So it seems I have SLI up to $1M - do (sensible) people purchase extra cover? What happens in multi-million dollar liability cases.

SLI will add on top of the base insurance, so what I was seeing would be $1.3m in total as there was a base $300k. 

Most people just hope they dont have them, and ultimately they are rare (though more common than in the UK). Some people buy uninsured/underinsured cover so if you can't pay they can claim off their insurance. As a non-US resident their options to recover more from you is going to be limited, it's common there to have a wage attachment order but thats not going to work internationally.

The  "problem" with the US is the complexity of their legal jurisdiction with each state having its own laws and some smaller subdivisions too so it's hard to talk in general. Firstly I believe in some states it's possible to go bankrupt and avoid such payments whereas in E&W personal injury settlements cannot be included in bankruptcy. Secondly, in much of the US its not possible to insure against punitive damages so even if you have insurance the judge can add punishment that a US insurer couldn't cover; never looked into SLI would work in that case given in principle they blindly replicate the lower insurance's terms.