For a decade, the rideshare company on the other side of a crash carried a comfortable cushion of uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage. In California that cushion ran to one million dollars while the driver was engaged in a ride. As of January 1, 2026, Senate Bill 371 cut that figure to $60,000 per person and $300,000 per accident, a reduction of roughly 94 percent. For plaintiff counsel the consequence is immediate. The coverage math that used to resolve a serious rideshare injury in a single demand letter no longer works.
The client's own policy has become the load-bearing part of the recovery. Rebuilding the coverage stack around it, rather than around the transportation network company policy, is now the first exercise in every rideshare file. For readers tracking the wider shift in auto accident litigation, this is the year the rideshare playbook gets rewritten.
The periods still control
Rideshare coverage remains divided into the familiar three periods, and SB 371 did not touch the period structure, only the dollars attached to the active-ride window. Period 0 is the app-off private window, where only the driver's personal auto policy responds. Period 1 covers an app-on driver waiting for a match, with contingent liability limits and no meaningful UM/UIM. Periods 2 and 3, running from match acceptance through drop-off, are where the commercial policy and its now-shrunken UM/UIM sit.
Fixing the period at the moment of impact is still the threshold question, because it decides which insurer sits primary. What changed is that pinning the loss to an active ride no longer guarantees a deep well. A passenger struck by a hit-and-run driver mid-ride now looks at $60,000 in company UM coverage, not a million, and the rest has to come from somewhere.
Where the missing coverage lives
The answer is layering. Three sources deserve a hard look in every file:
- The client's personal UM/UIM. An injured passenger with their own auto policy carries UM/UIM that follows them as an occupant of any vehicle, a rideshare included. That coverage does not disappear because the client was riding rather than driving.
- Resident-relative coverage. A passenger who lives in a household with other insured vehicles may reach UM/UIM under a relative's policy as an insured family member, depending on how the policy defines the insured.
- The at-fault driver's liability limits. Where a third motorist caused the crash, that driver's bodily injury coverage is the true primary, and the company and personal UM/UIM respond only to the gap between damages and that recovery.
Two meanings of stacking
Stacking is a term that shifts by jurisdiction, and conflating the two versions is how demands get underpaid. In states that permit inter-policy stacking, a claimant can add the limits of multiple UM/UIM policies together, so a $60,000 company layer and a $100,000 personal layer combine toward a larger pool. California is not one of those states. Here, underinsured coverage is a reduced coverage. The client's UIM limit is offset by amounts recovered from the at-fault driver, and the client reaches the higher applicable limit rather than the sum. In a reduced-coverage state the productive move is to position the personal policy as excess over the company layer and to press every liability source first, preserving the UIM ceiling.
Lock the trip record early
Two evidentiary tasks fall at the front of the file. First, preserve the trip data. A preservation letter to the rideshare company for the ride log, driver status, and GPS timeline fixes the period before the carrier's version of events hardens. The company controls that record, and a spoliation posture is far stronger asserted in week one than in month ten.
Second, collect declarations pages for the client and every resident relative. The layering analysis is only as good as the policies you have actually read, and coverage that no one requested is coverage the client never sees. Where the recovery will run through several policies, the order of payment and any reimbursement obligations feed directly into settlement accounting, so the disbursement plan should be sketched before the first demand goes out.
The demand strategy after the cut
The old approach treated the company UM/UIM as the anchor and the client's policy as an afterthought. SB 371 inverts that. The anchor is now the client's coverage and the liability of any third-party driver, with the reduced company layer filling a smaller role than it once did. Counsel who build the file around the client's own stack, document every layer, and quantify the offsets before negotiating will hold serious rideshare cases together in a way that a company-policy-first habit no longer supports.
None of this is exotic. It is disciplined coverage work applied to a statute that shrank the easy money. The firms that adjust their intake and preservation habits now will feel the change far less than those still drafting demands to a million-dollar limit that no longer exists. The interplay between the new limits and how courts read UM arbitration rights is worth watching in the recent case law as the first post-SB 371 disputes reach the appellate courts.