Comprehensive Coverage
Security On and Off the Road
Comprehensive covers damage to your car from causes other than a collision: theft, fire, vandalism, weather, falling objects, animal strikes, and glass. In California it is the coverage that answers a vehicle lost to wildfire, and the one that answers rising water, which your home policy does not. It applies subject to a deductible.
What does comprehensive coverage actually cover?
Insurance Code 660 splits physical damage by cause. Collision coverage answers loss from collision or upset; comprehensive answers everything else. That makes it the broader of the two, and it covers events largely outside your control, including:
How does a comprehensive claim get repaired?
Two of those matter more in California than the list suggests. A car destroyed in a wildfire is a comprehensive loss, which is why households that lost vehicles alongside homes in recent fires made two separate claims. And water is treated the opposite way from property insurance. Rising water that would be excluded from a homeowners policy and need separate flood cover is a comprehensive loss on a vehicle.
Theft is the other one worth naming, and it now includes parts as much as whole cars. Catalytic converter theft leaves a repair bill rather than a missing vehicle, and it runs under comprehensive subject to the deductible, which is where a high deductible can swallow the claim.
Who chooses the repair shop?
You do. Under 10 CCR 2695.8, an insurer may not require that a car be repaired at a specific shop. Once you have named the shop you want, it may not suggest or recommend a different one except as the Insurance Code permits. Nor may it tell you your shop has a record of poor work when that is not true.
It also may not make that claim on the basis that your shop declined to take part in a labor rate survey. Direct repair programs are an offer, not a requirement.
What if the insurer's estimate is too low?
The estimate has to be written at an amount that allows the repair to be done to accepted trade standards for good and workmanlike work. If you obtain a higher written estimate, the insurer has three options and has to take one of them.
Pay the difference between the two estimates. Or, if you ask, name at least one shop that will do the work for the insurer's figure. Or adjust your shop's estimate and give you the adjusted version, identifying each specific change and the cost attached to it.
What about parts, labor, and towing?
An insurer cannot require non-original replacement crash parts unless several conditions are met together. The parts must be at least equal to the original in kind, quality, safety, fit, and performance. The insurer has to warrant that and disclose the warranty in writing on the estimate, and pay for any modifications needed to make the part fit.
On a partial loss, the labor to repair or replace the damage is not subject to depreciation or betterment unless the policy contains a clear and unambiguous provision allowing it. Where towing and storage are reasonably necessary to protect the car from further loss, reasonable charges are payable, and the insurer has to give you notice before it stops paying storage.
Where damage is severe enough that the car is written off rather than repaired, the valuation rules take over. Those sit on the collision coverage page, and they apply the same way to a comprehensive total loss.
Claims regulations change from time to time. The provisions described here reflect Title 10 of the California Code of Regulations as published at the time of writing.
Comprehensive is usually the less expensive half of physical damage cover and the one people drop first on an older car. Before doing that, it helps to weigh the deductible against what the vehicle is worth and what it sits next to overnight. We can price it both ways so the saving is visible against what it gives up.
