Spent about 2 hrs so far with AAA and an insurance agency with neither of them giving me quotes.
What a racket. The law requires us to have insurance, I drive well enough that the only payout insurance has ever made in my entire lifetime was when my insurance company actually didn't contest something they should have contested (a driver rear-ended me). It's pretty much free money for them and they still don't want to come through with a quote in a timely manner.
Ok. Talked with an experienced insurance agent my family has worked with over the years. Apparently part of the problem I'm experiencing is that insurance corporations feel CA is limiting their profits too much so they're just pulling out of California entirely (as they have done with climate effects on risks for disaster/fire insurance). There's just a handful left writing new policies, according to this agent.
If you let your old policy lapse, the insurer often will not reinstate i t.
They said if I can get coverage through AAA, that will be the lowest cost coverage for sure. But they're going to try to get quotes from the few left doing this coverage in CA. They are now taking up to 15 days to get back on it.
If I'm interpreting what I heard correctly (or heard it correctly), they are also balky about older cars because they don't get all the spyware (my term) they get in modern cars.
They can't scrutinize every aspect of how you use the car & they've gotten used to that, I think. Sounds like how advertisers are now. They'd rather advertise where they get TONS of data about you rather than a print ad where they don't.
Note: this explanation I was given might be specific to the type/class of used car I'm trying to insure (2004 custom van), but the agent didn't say that explicitly so it could also just have to apply more generally to older cars.
They said the effect of this, of course, is that there are a lot more uninsured drivers in CA right now.
A star chamber of "supervisors" who didn't talk to me and didn't leave any names determined this personal custom van (sold with wheelchair equipment from the first) is a "commercial vehicle" and refuses to insure it.
I asked how many disabled people were on the supervisorial decision-making group. Got a big silence there.
The photos make it so obvious to ANYONE who knows anything about vans that this is a van that was initially sold this way. It just has captain's chairs instead of benches.
Ok. More on this as I talked with the insurance agent again (who is older than me even and also has experience with a disabled family member so they have a teeny bit more knowledge of what it's like going through this crap).
I asked them to hold off on going after quotes because if something was registered wrong in the past, I don't want it to affect the quotes before I can go through DMV to try to repair this.
They let me know that it was not uncommon in CA to force disabled ppl w vans to
register the vans as commercial. Possibly because pre-ADA they'd be using commercial loading zones.
It's possible a past owner might have registered commercial because they were running a side-gig offering rides to other disabled people.
In any case, something is flagging on the VIN number that did not flag when I was paying for the Carfax. Possibly not something they display on their reports. And AAA is seeing that (even though THEY are the ones who registered the car for me) and
saying it's "commercial". Because we now live in a world of decisionmakers without accountability and low-paid automatons who will take any computer mistakes as gospel while completely ignoring the words of the person with the actual experience who is standing in front of the vehicle live, I'm going to have to try to troubleshoot this with the DMV before trying for another insurance quote. I don't want the other insurance companies to be poisoned by this mistake.
BTW, this is another example of systemic ableism. The people making the decision aren't disabled, don't know what mobility vans are like and about. The commercial registration and insurance COST MORE yet we impoverish disabled people by putting disabled people out of work, paying them less, policing disability income if they can't work.
No accountability from those who made these decisions.
Here's another twist on this whole "insuring a used wheelchair van" saga - if the problem AAA has is that they consider it a commercial van - why didn't the offer me a quote for a commercial policy AND how are all the drivers who are working for Uber, Lyft or both getting their vehicles insured??? @disability#Ableism#CripTax
For 2024 our auto insurer added a very detailed clause prohibiting use of the vehicle for Uber, etc. I suspect people who were driving for those services just weren’t notifying their insurers, but that will be a lot harder in future. It probably took a while for the big insurers to hammer out those clauses with state regulators.
For the commercial policy they probably want the applicant to be some form of corporate entity, whether LLC or some form of corp.