Hello! My apartment building has a parking garage with a car stacker system (the cars are on elevators and "stacked").
There is a problem with the stacker and I am unable to retrieve my car. As a result I am taking additional expenses for ubering to work.
Spoke with my car/renter insurance and they said they don't have any coverage for this type of situation.
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Are there some insurance policys that cover scenarios like this?
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Is the apartment complex obligated to cover expenses? If relevant, I live in California.
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Any other recommendations on how to get expenses covered?
Thanks!
Unable to retrieve car from own parking garage
byu/The_Ice_Raccoon inInsurance
Posted by The_Ice_Raccoon
5 Comments
Loss of use is a thing, but only due to a covered loss. “My car is stuck” isn’t a covered loss unless the mechanism actually damages your car. This also applies to property insurance which comes into play when a house or apt isn’t habitable (with other examples like loss of business income due to a covered loss for commercial properties).
You arent going to find coverage for this because nothing is damaging your insured interest. This gets into (MAYBE) legal territory, and I’d expect your landlord to offer rent credit or to reimburse for expenses, but that is well outside the realm of insurance.
The only entity that would be liable is your apartment. Whether or not they actually are is impossible to know at this point. You should talk to your landlord.
This is not an insurance issue, this is a landlord issue. They denied you the use of your car and parking spot, you need to ask for compensation.
Your insurance is not applicable, since there was no covered loss. You can file suit against the garage operator. Whether or not you will be successful is another question entirely.
The vehicle being inaccessible doesn’t create a covered loss, so no rental would normally apply. As usual it depends on what your policy and endorsements actually say though. Some endorsements have weird coverages for indirect losses.
You claim type also happens when the exit ramps to a parking garage have a structural collapse, but leave the rest of the building standing with your car stranded. It also happened a couple years ago in Yellowstone when there was a flood and one of the main roads got washed out in both directions from where a bunch of cars and tourists were. Also in cases where a bridge collapses and the car is intact undamaged, but stranded on top of the collapsed bridge.
IIRC when I researched this decades ago the controlling case law had to do with a locomotive on a siding. The siding went over a trestle and dead-ended. The train was over there on the other side when the bridge got hit by lightning and burned to the ground. It would have cost more to rebuild the trestle than the locomotive was worth, so the railroad made a claim for the “lost” locomotive. Court decided that it wasn’t technically “damaged” so no claim applied.