The brutal truth about consumer automotive insurance as it relates to your fleet: more drivers than ever are driving uninsured and underinsured.
As uninsured and underinsured driver rates climb, dealerships that run loaner, courtesy, and mobility programs carry a growing percent of the exposure. The dealers who solve coverage first protect their fleet utilization, their retention, and their bottom line. They also turn the rising risk into a competitive advantage for their store’s profitability and the customers’ experience.
For years, whether a customer carried adequate auto insurance was the customer’s problem. For dealers who put people behind the wheel of loaner, courtesy, and mobility vehicles, that is no longer true. The good news is that the dealers who address it first can turn a rising risk into an edge over the store down the street.
Why are more drivers uninsured and underinsured?
The shift starts with affordability. Full-coverage premiums jumped 26 percent in 2024 and averaged roughly $2,678 in 2025. Faced with those costs, more drivers are cutting back or dropping coverage. By 2023, one in three drivers on the road was uninsured or underinsured, a ten point jump since 2017, and roughly one in seven carried no insurance at all.
The word that gets overlooked is underinsured. A driver can hand over a valid insurance card and still carry limits far too low to cover a serious accident. When the claim runs past those limits, the shortfall does not disappear. It falls to the dealership. Underinsured drivers are just as big a risk as uninsured ones, and there are far more of them on the road. Which means the likelihood of seeing them in the service lane is also more likely to occur.
Why does the risk land on the dealership?
Service loaners, courtesy vehicles, test drives, and mobility programs are how modern stores compete on convenience and protect loyalty. Every one of those programs puts a dealer-owned vehicle in the hands of a driver whose coverage the store once had no way to confirm. The flip side is just as damaging. And that is when a customer needs coverage to accept the vehicle, but the store has no easy way to give it to them.
If either of those two scenarios are present and overlooked, the vehicle damage and third-party liability land on the dealership, showing up as scattered claims, higher garage policy premiums, and write-offs rather than a single obvious line item.
The hidden cost: turn-aways and lost fleet utilization
That exposure forces a bad choice at the counter along with a bad set of options. If you turn the driver away and you hurt CSI, lose the repair order, and push a loyal customer toward a more convenient repair option. You also lose utilization and a loaner that sits idle while earning nothing. It erodes the return on a fleet the store is already paying to carry. Let the driver go uncovered, and you simply absorb the risk. Neither is a viable strategy for profitability.
Why now is the time to act
None of these pressures are easing. Affordability will not snap back, mobility programs keep expanding, and margins are already tight. The dealers getting ahead of this are reframing coverage from a compliance afterthought into a strategic lever. Handled well, it protects the balance sheet, keeps every customer moving, maximizes fleet utilization, and can even turn a liability into a new revenue stream.
The coverage gap is not going away. The only real question is whether your store turns it into an advantage before your competitors do.
Sources: Insurance Research Council (Uninsured and Underinsured Motorists); industry premium data, 2024 to 2025.
