Reader question:

I’m a writer and I live on a mountain, pretty much by myself. There’s a town a few miles away, but I keep to myself and only go there when I need to buy something. I own two cars, which are exactly the same in year, make, and model. Why is it that I have to have liability car insurance coverage for both vehicles? I can only drive one at a time?

Gary

Kind of weird question there, Gary, but okay.

I feel like your asking me one of those mind bender questions, like how could a house with four windows have them all facing north. However, assuming that you do live all alone on the top of a mountain with an exact copy of the same car, it does bring up an interesting point about liability car insurance that must be brought across. You don’t have to be in a car to be liable for what it does. That might be a silly statement at first. After all, it isn’t like your car is going to start on its own and run over the mayor’s expensive doberman that wandered up from below.

However, there are many situation where the car you don’t use could get into an accident even while you aren’t using it. For one thing, something could go wrong with the breaks and it can roll off a cliff and fall through someone’s roof, which would end up in significant property damage and possibly death. Another thing that it could do would be if you lent it to somebody else to drive it.

You might be protesting that your brakes are fine and that you would never let anybody else borrow your car, not even over your dead body. But the point to all of this is that your car insurance company doesn’t know that. What they know is that you own two vehicles, and they know nothing about you personally, so they can’t take it on your decency and honesty when you say that the second vehicle will do no harm. As far as they are concerned, anything can happen with that car.

Another thing to consider is that often when someone lives alone but owns two of the same car, it will be a red flag going up for fraud by misrepresentation. It will be hard for the auto insurance company to believe that you don’t have somebody else who is regularly using this vehicle, so they will tread lightly around your policy. However you shake it, though, it is necessary to have liability car insurance coverage regardless of what you think you might or might not do with a car.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.