There are many different types of businesses that might need tow truck insurance. It’s crucial to make sure that your business is fully protected from the risks that you face. When you go to get insurance for your business, you can’t forget the insurance on your tow trucks. We’ll explain a few different business types that might need insurance for tow trucks and what coverages you can consider.
4 businesses that might need tow truck insurance.
1. Auto body shops.
If you have an auto body shop, you might have a few tow trucks to help move customer vehicles – it’s just handy to have a couple wreckers or rollbacks around so that you can tow cars. Along with other coverages to protect the auto body shop itself, you need to make sure that you have insurance for tow trucks.
For example, let’s say that you use your tow truck to bring a customer’s car back to your shop. You’re about a mile away from your premises when a deer runs across the road. You swerve automatically and end up hitting a tree. Your truck and the customer’s car are pretty smooshed.
2. Roadside assistance.
Running a roadside assistance business brings with it a lot of risks. Well, the main part of roadside assistance is being able to get to the people who need help, right? And that means that you need a truck. That’s why it’s important to make sure you have the right coverage – including coverage for your own liability and your tow truck or roadside assistance vehicle.
Let’s say that you head out to help someone change their tire. You find the driver, who’s pretty glad to see you, and you change the tire. You send the driver on their way, but they only get a mile down the road before the tire pops off their car and causes them to have an accident. This is why garage liability insurance is important (even if you don’t have a physical garage location.)
3. Towing disabled cars.
You might have a contract with your city, county, or state to tow disabled cars, or maybe you just have a tow truck business. It’s important to make sure that every truck in your fleet is covered with the proper tow truck insurance. If you’re a towing business and you store customer’s cars on your premises, you will probably need to consider a garagekeepers insurance policy when you think about getting insurance for tow trucks.
To give a sample scenario, imagine that you tow someone’s car back to your premises because it’s the middle of the night and their mechanic’s shop isn’t open. You drop the car off, lock up, and head home. But then a fire starts at your premises and ruins the car.
4. Repo businesses.
If you have a business that does repo, you’ll need to make sure you have the right repo insurance. Not only do you face the risk of just driving and being on the road, you could also get in trouble if you accidentally repossess a car that you’re not supposed to.
While it might sound a bit far-fetched, there are a few ways that could happen:
- You could flat-out take the wrong car by mistake.
- You could get a request for a repo and go to get the car, only to find out that the owner has made their payment in the time it took for the request to get to you. Unfortunately, you forgot to check that you still had to repossess the car before heading out.
- You don’t have a written notice to repossess the vehicle. A verbal request isn’t enough.
What tow truck insurance coverages should I consider?
When you’re getting insurance for tow trucks, you can consider the following coverages:
- Auto liability insurance can help you cover your legal obligation to another driver if you’re at fault in an accident and injure them or damage their property. It can help cover your legal expenses if they sue.
- Bodily injury liability can help cover the other driver’s medical expenses.
- Property damage liability can help you repair or replace other peoples’ property that you might damage in an accident – for example, the other driver’s car.
- Physical damage insurance can help you get your tow truck back on the road ASAP if it’s damaged.
- Collision insurance can help you repair or replace your truck if you’re in an accident or otherwise collide with something.
- Comprehensive insurance can help you repair or replace your truck if it’s damaged by something like fire, theft, vandalism, falling objects (like trees), or animal strikes.
- Garagekeepers insurance can help you if you ever have care, custody, or control of your clients’ cars. It covers the customer’s vehicles against losses such as fire, theft, and vandalism.
- Garage liability can cover you against liability-related claims of bodily injury or property damage that arise from the day-to-day operations of your business or the services you provide.
- On-hook/In-tow insurance covers your customer’s car while it’s attached to your tow truck.
- Wrongful repo insurance can help protect you against claims that you repossessed a car that you weren’t supposed to.
So, there you have it – those are a few business types that might need to get tow truck insurance. We have an entire team of agents who are experts at tow truck insurance, so we can help you get quotes and get the policy that’s right for you. You can get started with your quotes by filling out our online quote form or giving us a call today.
