Why It's So Difficult To Take A Truck Off Your Insurance

All right, so I'm going to get into why insurance companies are such a pain when it comes to taking off a vehicle and, and why they require so much. So let's get into it. Okay? If you guys own a trucking company, you got insurance, you know, if you guys have federal filings is what you guys might know them as, and you try to, you try to remove a truck, the insurance company is not going to let you just go, okay, hey, perfect, let's go and take off this truck. You know, let's go in and do that. So it's not like an auto policy where you can go to remove a truck at any point. They make a huge pain out of it. And you guys might be wondering why this is the insurance company's fault. This is such pain. I get people complaining to me about it all the time. I've actually had somebody call me. They're with a really good company I represent. I know them and he's like, hey, my, my insurance company won't let me remove this truck without providing proof of, proof of sale or, or lease termination. My truck's in the shop. So I mean, I'm not making money off. It's not going to be running well. The reason that insurance companies are like this, it's not really the insurance company's choice, believe me, it, if they could allow you to take out the truck, they, they probably would have no problem with it if it wasn't for the fmcsa. And so I'll kind of get into what this is that I'm talking about and why they do this. So the FMCSA makes the insurance companies file what's called a BMC 91X. You guys might, might also know it as the MCS 90. They are extremely similar. So what this is, is when you guys are going in interstate operations or you guys are going interstate and you guys are driving a semi, you're going to need federal filings, BMC 91X, MCS 90, whatever the heck call it, right? And so you know that you can go look on safer. That's why all these guys are calling you non stop for fuel cards, insurance, all that type of stuff. Because they see that either your renewal is coming up for insurance soon or you just got your authority, whatever, right? All this stuff is public information, who your insurance company is with or who, who your insurance is with and all sorts of stuff. So that is from this MCS 90 endorsement KEB. And what I've got pulled up here is the MCS 90 endorsement. So when or BMC 91. So when you get insurance through a new insurance company and you gotta have federal filings because you know if you're, if you don't have federal filings and your insurance not reporting, you're not gonna be hauling much for real long or you're gonna lose your authority. The insurance company is going to fill out this deal. So they're going to say, hey, you know, insurance company name, I'm doing this, filling out all this information here. They're going to send it to the FMTSA and they're usually going to post it here in about 24 hours. Right. But this wording down here is why it is such a pain to remove a vehicle or a truck, I should say off of your insurance. So it says right here, the liability of this company extended to all losses, damages, injuries or death occurring within the authority granted by the insured or to the insured by the FMCSA or elsewhere. Now when it says that, it says all losses. The all is the key word. This going to sound crazy. I've had some people not believe me, but your insurance company is going to pay for a loss whether the driver's not in the policy. Let me back up real quick. This is for liability purposes, your auto liability, not general liability, not cargo, not nothing else. Auto liability. If the driver's not on the policy, let's say you're listed as general freight. You decide to pick up a load of chemicals or gasoline or something, you decide to drive a truck that's on the policy. Anything that might be excluded, right. On your policy. The FMCSA is making your insurance company pay that claim whether they like it or not. Right. Well, how does that make sense? So what they're going to do is if you're paying insurance, right. And it's for something that's supposed to be covered, great. They're going to cover it and they're going to pay out the claim and everybody's going to be happy hopefully. Right. If you are doing something that's excluded on the policy, like a driver not being listed, etc, they're going to pay the claim because they have this BMC 91 and then they're going to go subrogate against you, which means they're going to go sue you for everything you've got and take, take their money back for what they paid on the claim. So how does this all relate into why it's such a pain to remove a truck? This all comes back to it because whether, let's say you got a truck in the shop like, hey, it's gonna be the shop for three months, right? I'm not gonna be driving this freaking thing. Well, what the insurance company's doing is, hey, we don't know when this thing's gonna be back on the road again. And I'm liable to pay for any claims whether it's out on the pulse or not. So what this BMC 91 does is it covers all trucks owned or operated, even if your buddy drives under your authority for a couple days. Whatever the case is, that truck has to be on there. And if they find out that it's not, they're going to cancel you so fast. But that's the reason, because they have to pay for that truck whether it's being driven or not. Like if they're. Their whole thought is if it's in the shop. And what happens if you decide to drive out the shop? What are you going to do, call them and add it before or you drive a shop? Not everybody's. Not everybody's that. That organized. And so that risk is why they make you have the bill, sale, lease, termination, whatever the company requires to take that truck off. So that's kind of the explanation there. You know, some people are talking about how progressive is making them sign off on forms saying they've got all the trucks and stuff on there. If they find other trucks inspected under your DOT and they're not listening to policy, you're going to be hearing from your insurance company. Everybody is tightening down on this stuff like crazy. So, yes, it's a pain. No, your insurance company does not want to do this. But what are some. Now that I've kind of gotten to the negative here. How. What are some ways around this deal? Right, the ways around, you know, with it being a pain on taking off trucks and stuff like that is some companies have gotten a little bit creative with it. So Great west has what's called a spare rate. So if you have a truck and there is no driver, if there's a driver, they won't do this. But if there's no driver, they'll give you a spare rate, which means it's going to be cheaper. The truck's sitting. You know, Canal has pay per mile insurance. So that way if the truck's not driving, it's in the shop, your liability premium is going to be nothing. You still have to pay for cargo and physical damage and stuff like that if you have those coverages. But at least you're not paying for auto liability. So adjust based on what's being driven. Some Companies will connect your telematics. A lot of people hate connecting telematics. Oh, it's evil. They're spying on me. But it actually makes your life a lot easier because if they see your telematics data and they go, oh, you know, this truck is no longer listening to the eld. Well, you gotta have an ELD to be trucking. So obviously, if you're ELD mandated, sometimes they'll let it buy without a bill of sale, lease termination, something like that. So makes your life a lot easier, right? They'll just check ELD data. Oh, perfect, you're good. We'll take off this truck for you. So that's another way. And then, yeah, there's multiple companies that offer the ELD integration, which I hear a lot of kickback on. A lot of you guys don't like that. And then the other thing would be, yeah, the pay per mile. There's multiple people who offer pay per mile. So you've got hdvi, you've got canal. If you don't have a semi, Fairmatic will do. Pay per mile on box trucks, vans, all that type of stuff. So let's just name a couple. But that's kind of what it is. The last deal is, hey, my truck's in the shop. Or, you know, if you got. Maybe it's not the truck in the shop, but there's some situation where you're not selling this thing. You can either get it. Like if there's a claim, you can use a total loss letter. So you could send in that loss saying, hey, this thing's a total loss, they'll take it off. Then there's a non op letter or non operational letter from the dot. The dot comes out and specs it. The main thing that we're using or that's most popular with us is if you're not selling the truck or you're not turning the lease or something, you just turn the tags. Hey, this thing's gonna be sitting for a while, or whatever the case is. Or, you know, I'm trying to sell whatever the case is. Right. You can turn the tags. If you got the receipt, turn in the tags. Perfect. Boom. Take out the truck for you. So this kind of an explanation, because a lot of people ask me on it, so I wanted to make a little video just describing that again, if you guys are watching this, please, like subscribe. I'm going to keep making content for truckers and I just want to help and support you guys. So if you could subscribe and like the video, just helps me out, support more truckers. So thanks for watching, guys.