Repair shops, body and collision, tire dealers, oil change, and auto glass — written with the garagekeepers coverage that actually protects customer vehicles.
Auto service is a class where the wrong policy looks identical to the right one until a customer's car is damaged on your lot. The two things that decide it are whether you have garage liability rather than plain general liability, and whether your garagekeepers coverage is written direct primary or legal liability. We write this class heavily and those are the first two things we check.
An auto service business needs a garage policy, not a standard business owner's policy with a general liability form. The garage form is built around the exposures of a business that takes possession of customers' vehicles: it combines premises liability, operations liability, products and completed operations for the repairs you perform, and auto liability for vehicles you drive — including test drives and shuttling cars around the lot.
A shop written on a standard BOP frequently has gaps in exactly those places. It is a common and expensive mistake.
This is the coverage that separates a properly written auto service account from a badly written one, and almost nobody outside the industry understands it.
General liability does not cover customer vehicles in your care. The standard policy excludes damage to property in your care, custody, or control — which is precisely what every car on your lot is. Garagekeepers coverage is the endorsement that fills it, and it comes in two very different forms:
Direct primary costs more and is almost always the right answer. The reason is customer relationships as much as economics: telling a customer their car was destroyed on your lot but it isn't your problem is not a conversation that ends with them coming back. Check which form your current policy carries — a lot of shops are on legal liability without knowing it.
The other number to check is the limit. Garagekeepers is usually written with a per-location limit, and shops routinely carry limits set years ago when the lot held fewer and cheaper cars. Count the vehicles on your lot on a busy Friday, multiply by current values, and compare.
When a repair fails and causes an accident, the claim is a products-completed operations claim against your garage policy. Brake work, steering and suspension, and wheel installation are the highest-severity examples — a wheel that separates after a tire service produces a claim of a magnitude nothing else in the shop approaches.
Two things follow from this. First, completed operations coverage needs to stay in force after work is done, because the claim arrives later. Second, documentation of torque procedures and quality checks is worth real money at claim time — a shop that can show its process defends a claim far better than one that cannot.
Licensed in five states. We write this coverage across North and South Carolina — our primary markets — as well as Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida.
Also written in this category. These classes don't have their own page yet — call or send a submission and we'll quote them the same way.