Practice areas / Rideshare accidents
Uber, Lyft and delivery accident claims
passenger, driver or the car they hit
Insurance coverage in a rideshare crash depends on the driver's app status at the time of impact: logged off, waiting, matched, or carrying a passenger.
That status can determine whether a personal or commercial policy applies. The platform's trip and account records should be requested early.
What Florida law actually says
Florida's transportation network company law sets insurance tiers by app status. A driver carrying a rider or heading to one can put a $1 million policy in play (Fla. Stat. 627.748).
A driver who is logged in and waiting is on lower statutory limits. A driver who is logged off is on a personal policy that may exclude commercial driving entirely.
Delivery platforms are not all covered by the same statute, and their policies differ app by app.
What gets secured first
The trip and app-status records, preserved through the platform before they become an argument
Every policy in the stack: the driver's personal coverage, the platform's, your own UM
Dashcam and telematics, which rideshare vehicles carry more often than the average car
Whether the driver's personal carrier has a livery exclusion, because that is where these claims go sideways
Asked in the first phone call
I was a passenger. Whose insurance pays?
Potentially several in sequence: your own PIP, the platform's policy for the engaged period, and the other driver's coverage if someone else caused it. Passengers are usually the best-covered people in these crashes. The order of operations is the lawyer's job.
A rideshare driver hit me while I was driving my own car.
Then the app status at the moment of impact decides which policy answers to you. That single fact can move the available coverage by an order of magnitude, which is why it gets locked down in writing early.
Nothing on this site is legal advice. The deadlines and standards described here are general, they have exceptions, and they change. Florida rewrote several of them in 2023. Do not use this site to calculate your own deadline.