Who Pays When Someone Is Hurt Loading or Unloading a Vehicle?

Liability coverage follows the use of a vehicle, and use includes putting things into it and taking them out. A cart rolls off a curb while you load a trunk, a box falls on a passerby, a store clerk drops a television onto someone's foot while lifting it into your SUV. Which insurer pays depends on where it happened and who was doing the lifting.

The California rule for business premises

Insurance Code section 11580.9 addresses loading and unloading directly. When two or more policies apply to the same loss arising out of loading or unloading a motor vehicle, and one of them is issued to the owner, tenant or lessee of the premises where it happens, the law conclusively presumes that the policy covering the vehicle is not primary.

The premises policy pays first. The vehicle's policy becomes excess over all other valid insurance, with limits up to the state's financial responsibility requirements. The premises policy must also cover the premises owner's employees as additional insureds for the loading work while they act in the course of their jobs.

Who your policy covers for loading

A second rule sits in Insurance Code section 11580.1. A California liability policy covers permitted users of your vehicle, but for loading and unloading it may limit that coverage to the named insured, a relative living in the household, a lessee or bailee of the vehicle, or an employee of any of them. A stranger helping you load may not be an insured under your policy at all.

A worked example, limits only

You carry liability of $100,000/$300,000. At a furniture store's loading dock, a store employee loading a bookcase into your SUV lets it slip, and it injures another shopper.

1. Two policies may apply: the store's and yours.
2. Because the loading happened on the store's premises and the store carries its own policy, section 11580.9 makes the store's policy primary.
3. Your policy is excess, and only up to the financial responsibility limits the statute references.
4. The store's employee is covered by the store's policy as an additional insured for the loading.

Change the setting to your own driveway, with your brother helping you load, and the special rule drops away. Your policy's ordinary loading coverage applies, and your brother is covered if he is a relative living with you or otherwise falls within the people your policy names.

Practical points

• Let store staff do the lifting where they offer to; it puts their coverage first.
• Report any loading injury to your insurer even if you think the store's policy will handle it.
• If you load or unload as part of a business, such as deliveries, check that your policy accepts that use at all.

Questions about how your liability applies beyond driving are a good reason for a policy review; you can start one with a quote request.