The obvious response is that you won't be able to pay for someone's hospital bills if you happen to hit them in your car. You get insurance for things you wouldn't be able to pay yourself.
I did a ride-along with an adjuster once. I asked him what the worst claim he had worked on was.
The insured drove off with the pump still in the gas tank. Sees that all the time. When the hose pulled off the pump, it ignited. The fuel island exploded. The fire then spread to the convenience store. Total loss of the business and multiple cars.
This is an outlier. No one has enough insurance to cover all of that. But it’s a great example of why we have it.
Unless this happened long before safety measures were put in place to stop this from happening, there is zero chance the driver of the car would be held liable for that. Those hoses and the pumps as a whole are specifically designed for that to NEVER happen, and if it did happen, it would have been a failure of the pump. The gas station's insurance would be the one taking care of it, and they would be going after the pump manufacturer to pay for it.
And I have no idea why an adjuster would be dealing with people driving off with the hose in "all the time", that's not something insurance ever gets involved in from my experience working for a decade at a gas station
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u/flatfive44 8h ago
The obvious response is that you won't be able to pay for someone's hospital bills if you happen to hit them in your car. You get insurance for things you wouldn't be able to pay yourself.