Product Innovation: How Usage-Based Cover Fills Workers Comp Gap for Rideshare Platforms

October 9, 2017 by Stephen Mueller

It was just three years ago when more than a dozen state insurance chiefs issued strongly worded consumer alerts declaring an insurance coverage gap for passengers in rideshare vehicles. Insurers, for their part, were slow to provide solutions for the rideshare community. In some cases, they were even actively hostile toward ridesharing.

At the time, only the surplus lines market was a willing provider of insurance coverage for rideshare vehicles, likely at a premium well above the actual cost of risk. Given this state of affairs, if consumers could not trust that rideshare vehicles were safe, the very premise upon which the sharing economy was built was in danger.