Pilot Car Insurance 101: Costs, Coverage, and Common Mistakes

Foreign hey guys, I am Hunter with Nelson Insurance. I'm going to go over pilot car insurance. I'm going to run through pretty much who are the insurance agencies that'll do this. Yes, you can go directly to the insurance carriers. So I'll talk about the insurance carriers who will do this. I'm going to talk about the coverages you guys need and what prices all kind of look like stuff like that. So with pilot car insurance there's really not a whole lot of options. You look at car insurance, there are hundreds and hundreds of insurance companies who will do pilot or do auto insurance or do home insurance. Even on trucking insurance there's like 40 different insurance companies do trucking if not more. Pilot cars is kind of like tow trucks and amusement parks and like whatever else where it's really, really pretty difficult to find public car insurance. So when it comes to insurance agencies, if you want to go through insurance agency I'll kind of get into what I recommend going insurance agency or direct lead to the insurance company. Obviously I'm an insurance agency so I'm gonna try to offer as least bias as I can here. Obviously it's coming from a pretty biased standpoint. So you guys get what I'm saying. But really when it comes down to pilot car insurance agencies there is Nelson Insurance Agency. We purchased strong insurance agency who was very popular in the pilot car industry. You have V.R. williams and the other one is like Charles something. I forget the name right now but it starts to see a lot of you guys that are in pilot cars know who I'm talking about. Yeah, I mean really those are the three big ones for the insurance agency side. On the insurance company side I have seen Kemper insurance not very popular. They're only in probably about 8 states or so sometimes national general you get your obvious ones. Progressive GEICO, Berkshire Hathaway Homestay Company is otherwise known as BHHC. Actually be very good on them. National Indemnity, which is a sister company to bhc. If you have BHC or national Debbie, I'd recommend bhsc. There's no extra middleman. I know a lot of you guys dunk the middleman. So when you go to Indemnity you have the consumer, you guys insurance agent, broker, then the insurance company. So there's a broker mix in there too. They don't work with insurance agencies directly. So Berkshire would be probably better. It's quicker service, quicker claims. I mean not really but you're getting rid of a middleman so usually things are quicker for you Guys like that things are quicker for us. But yeah, I mean there's really not a whole lot of options there. I mean I know it sounds kind of crazy but those options National General and Keer kind of like you know, miscellaneous Burkshire, you really can't call directly actually they've been our most popular probably in the last couple months. So they've been really good. Obviously like and GEICO are huge. Like they are really good in the stance of they're just the popular Progress, the largest commercial auto carrier out there or insurance company out there. Big for a reason, you know like and there's not really want to be best, it's just be situation by situation progressive. And progressive is incredibly heavy on your credit. Just because you have good credit doesn't mean they'll be the best either. But if you're really good credit, maybe progressive is the best. I see some guys paying like 2,000 bucks a year. Well it's like holy crap, how's. How are they so much cheaper than me paying 7,000 a year. A lot of it could be credit, could be type of vehicle obviously like your accidents and your violations. So it goes in your record, your garaging location makes a huge difference on your insurance costs. And Berkshire's is really good. Like I think for them it's really just depending on the garaging location. Like Texas, California are three. They're huge states. They're incredibly competitive there. I mean they're not competitive anywhere else. But there are some states they also are not very good at. So then GEICO and Progress will be coming in more maybe Kemp or National Interstate or I'm sorry National General. So yeah, you definitely could go call them directly. I really wouldn't recommend it. There are going to be situations where yeah maybe it is just better to call directly if you do not want general liability and professional liability. I'll get into those here in a minute. And you don't mind calling away The Hunter number 1800 number. Talking to somebody different every single time you do a lot of stuff on the app that you're just trying to get something really quick. I need insurance right now in 10 minutes. I don't want to shop around, I just want it real quick. Sure, go ahead, call direct. Might be better for you progressive me to offer you a quote right there on the phone guy. Cuz we offer you a quote right there on the phone. There is no pricing difference between an agent and calling the insurance carrier directly. If I keep saying carry it's what us agents refer to as I just want to specify that there is no difference. It is really just a personal preference. If you want to call an agency, talk to the same guy directly, get some advice, get shopped around, get access to Berkshire and National Indemnity and all those guys and Kemper and all that. Great. Go call an agent. A little shopping for you. But you are going to be waiting that day or maybe the next day to get your quote back versus if you call the insurance carrier directly or insurance company directly. Yes, you can get a call right there on the phone. So yeah, there's that. With the coverages you've got, obviously you got auto, right? You guys are driving, you need auto insurance, you need commercial auto insurance. Professional liability is a huge recommendation. You guys are leading these oversized trucks. You guys are heavily involved in operation. You guys are giving advice, all that sort of stuff there. You guys are a pilot car for a reason. To help with this operation. If something goes poorly. You lead a truck under a bridge. Bridge is not quite tall enough. You thought it was. It's not. They smoke the bridge, they don't clear traff. You guys don't alert traffic well enough. Whatever the case is, it all goes to court. It's all in the court's hand. You don't know exactly how it's gonna be played out, right? It's not my liability if you are partially a fault. If somebody sees it this way, whatever the case is, you're going to go defend yourself in court. Professional liability is very cheap in con in comparison to commercial auto. You're looking at maybe 1500 bucks for one truck. For general liability and professional liability, otherwise known as errors and omission. ENO recommendation. Every single insurance car or every single insurance agent you go talk to is going to recommend this. Nelson Insurance is the largest, the largest with our insurance carrier that we write with for professional liability in the nation. We have a lot of our guys who have this. We are the largest of the nation. So we have a little room with company that we use. We prefer pricing. Our underwriter gets us quotes back same day or within 24 hours. And it's really good relationship. So we, we have the relationship. We're really sitting pretty good there. You guys will have maybe coverage for equipment or for just tools and stuff that you guys are bringing along that be called inland marine coverage that could be packaged with your general liability and stuff sometimes. Otherwise it be a standalone policy. If it is permanently attached to the vehicle itself, the escort vehicle, then usually that they'll just be added on to the Commercial auto policy, you just tell your agent, hey, I've got $5,000 in all my stuff that's permanently attached to the vehicle. I want to make sure it's covered. Because on a commercial auto, it is not covered unless it is scheduled as permanently attached equipment. They are going to pay you off that vin. So if you do modifications to it or add stuff to it or whatever the case is, it's baseline. VIN is what's covered. So just so you guys are aware of that, a lot of these liability policies you guys are find online, I see in the group chats quite a bit. I'd be careful on them. They might be. A lot of them are premise only. What that means is a lot of you guys run your business out of your house or anything like that. You guys don't usually have an office for a, for a one unit pilot car operation. Now if you guys got 10, 20, 30 vehicles, yeah, you guys might have an office, whatever, right? But it's the premises liability. So if you run the business out of your home, you got a couple vehicles, somebody comes to your home, slips and falls, great, you're covered. What's your home liabilities for premise liability ain't going to do anything in your business. You guys are driving 100% of the time for the business, pretty much. Right. You know, premise liability does absolutely nothing there. So you want to make sure that your general liability is not covered, just premise liability, because then you are really. Yeah, it might be $200 more to get natural policy a year, but. Okay, wasting 500 bucks a year on a piece of paper right now for nothing. So what's 200 to make that extra 500 actually do something too. Right. You can also just package it with your professional liability, your errors on the mission, you know, whatever the heck you want to call it there. And it's really cheap. Like we have a general liabilities package on the professional for like 400 bucks a year. So yeah, decent deal there. But that is kind of an overview of pilot car insurance. There's really not a whole lot to it. There's all the insurance companies, coverages, recommendations, the insurance agencies. There's really not a whole lot of them that do know this stuff. So if you guys are not with one of the three agencies, again, I'm not saying just, oh, come to Nelson Insurance, we're the best. It's not advertised video, this education video, Right. So if you guys are V. Williams and you want to take a second look at your insurance, yeah, we'd be happy to. 100%. But if you're with them and you're like, I'm sitting good, I shopped around, I get a good price. Great. V.R. williams knows what they're doing. What was the other agency, you know, so we're happy to help. They're happy to help, I'm sure. I don't know. I have literally no affiliation with them. But yeah, I mean, there's just kind of the overview on insurance. So if you guys are with your same insurance company that has your home and auto, I would make sure they know what they're doing. Because pilot cars are kind of their own industry. You know, you got to know the industry, you got to know what you talk about. All we do is transportation insurance. So we know trucking industry. We know the pilot car industry. We got that stuff. You know, my father was in trucking, so it was kind of that deal. But yeah, if you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, check our website out. Call us if you've got any questions. Really, I'm happy to help. As you guys can see, it's not educational or it's not an advertising video. It's really more education. Appreciate you guys watching and like, and subscribe, if you would. Thanks.