The first auto declarations page I had to read properly looked like this:

1
BI      25/50
2
PD      10
3
PIP     50
4
MedPay  —
5
UM      25/50
6
SUM     100/300
7
COLL    500 ded
8
COMP    500 ded

Eight lines. I could tell you which regex caught each one. I could not have told you which of them would pay me if I got hurt, which would pay a stranger, or why two of them appeared to be the same thing written twice.

In the last piece I worked out the sorting rule, and it’s one question: whose contract is being claimed against? First party is you, third party is anyone who didn’t sign. That splits the list cleanly.

So this time: every coverage, sorted by that seam, one at a time. And then a single injury run through all of them, because a list of definitions taught me much less than watching one accident actually get paid for.

First, the word `tort`#

You cannot get through this topic without it, and nobody ever tells you what it means.

Tort comes from Latin tortus — “twisted.” Past participle of torquere, to twist. You already know the family:

Word	The twist in it
torque	literally twisting force
torsion	twisting
torture	originally the twisting of limbs
contort, distort	twisted out of shape
torch	rope twisted into a bundle and soaked
tortellini	pasta twisted into a little coil

So a tort is, literally, a thing that got twisted. Medieval French used tort for “wrong” or “injustice,” it crossed into English legal usage after the Norman conquest, and then it stayed in the law and never entered ordinary English. That’s why the word feels so alien — most Americans only ever meet it in car insurance and in the phrase “tort reform.”

And the metaphor underneath it is genuinely lovely:

The world was straight. Someone did something they shouldn’t have, and it got twisted. The law’s job is to twist it back.

That’s the whole worldview of tort law. Not punishment — that’s criminal law — but restoration. The stated goal is to make the plaintiff whole. Which is where the arithmetic comes from too: how much do you pay? Enough to cancel out the twist. Medical costs, lost wages, future earnings, pain and suffering — every line item is an attempt to quantify how far things bent.

And here’s why it matters for our purposes. Tort sits next to two neighbours:

	The wrong	Who pursues it	Outcome
Crime	a duty owed to society	the state prosecutes	prison, fines
Breach of contract	a promise you actually made	the other party	damages
Tort	a duty you never agreed to, that the law imposes anyway	the injured person	damages

Look at the bottom two. Breach of contract is “you signed and then didn’t deliver.” Tort is “you signed nothing, but the law says you owe every stranger a measure of care.” A driver owes that care to everyone on the road, with no contract anywhere.

Tort law exists precisely to govern what happens between two people who have no contract with each other.

Which is why a car crash is inherently a tort problem: you and the driver who hit you never signed anything. You’d never met. Default duties are all there is.

And that gives you the sharpest possible statement of what no-fault does — which I’ll come back to at the end:

No-fault moves injury compensation out of tort and into contract. Tort route: no contract between us, so I must prove you were careless. Contract route: I do have a contract with my own insurer, so I only need to prove I was hurt and that my policy covers it. Same seam as last time, wearing law-school clothes instead of claims-department clothes.

Now the coverages.

The third-party column: the two that pay other people#

These are the ones the state compels, and they are the only two on the page that do nothing whatsoever for you.

1. Bodily Injury Liability (BI)#

Injuries and deaths you cause to others. Never yours. Not one cent of it is for you — the most common misreading of an auto policy.

The two numbers are per person / per accident. Worked through, at a 25/50 limit, with you at fault and three people hurt:

	Actually injured	BI 25/50 pays
A	$40,000	$25,000 — hits the per-person cap
B	$20,000	$20,000
C	$15,000	$5,000 — the per-accident pot is now empty
	$75,000	$50,000

The uncovered $25,000 is yours personally. Savings, home equity, future wages. This is the thing a personal umbrella policy sits on top of, and it’s why umbrella is sold as its own product rather than as a bigger number on your auto policy — it stretches over your auto and your home liability at once.

Some policies instead use a Combined Single Limit — one pot, no per-person cap, and bodily injury and property damage draw from the same money. Generally better for you.

And don’t forget the invisible half from last time: a liability coverage also promises to defend you, and in standard personal auto that defence is paid on top of the limit. On a small policy, that promise is often worth more than the limit itself.

2. Property Damage Liability (PD)#

Damage you cause to other people’s property — usually their car, sometimes a fence, a storefront, a parked motorcycle. One limit per accident.

Look at how low the minimums go. New York’s is $10,000. Pennsylvania’s is $5,000. The average new car in the U.S. costs several times either figure. So “I carry the state minimum” can mean “I can pay for roughly a third of your car.”

That’s not a detail. It’s a preview of the ending.

The first-party column: the ones that pay you#

Nothing here is compelled by any state, with one big exception (PIP, below). Your lender compels most of it instead — finance or lease a car and collision and comprehensive are contractual conditions of the loan, which is why so many people believe they’re legally required.

3. Collision#

Damage to your car from hitting something — another vehicle, a guardrail, a pothole, a tree — or from rolling over. Subject to a deductible: the first $500 or $1,000 is yours.

4. Comprehensive — and the name is a lie#

Here’s my favourite thing in this entire article.

“Comprehensive” sounds like the coverage that covers everything. It isn’t. ISO’s actual name for it is “Other Than Collision” — and that’s the honest one, because that is exactly what it is: damage to your car from things that aren’t a collision.

And when you look at how state insurance departments enumerate it, you find it’s not open-ended at all. It’s a finite list of named perils:

missiles or falling objects · fire · theft or larceny · explosion or earthquake · windstorm · hail, water or flood · malicious mischief or vandalism · riot or civil commotion · contact with a bird or animal · breakage of glass

That’s from a state DOI’s own consumer listing. A list. With an end. Hit a deer, covered. Tree falls on the hood, covered. Car stolen, covered. Engine dies of old age, not covered — no peril, just entropy.

So the coverage marketed as comprehensive is a named-perils coverage, which in insurance terms is the narrow kind. If you read the property piece, this is the same named-vs-open perils distinction that separates HO-2 from HO-3 — and here the marketing name points in exactly the wrong direction. Other Than Collision never lied to anybody; it just didn’t sell as well. (I’ve since filed it into the article on how badly this industry names things, where it belongs — not a stale name or a drifted word, but a name pointing the wrong way.)

5. Medical Payments (MedPay)#

Medical bills for you and your passengers, regardless of fault, up to a small limit — often $1,000 to $10,000. No lawsuit, no liability finding, no argument. It pays and it’s done.

MedPay is old, small, and almost always optional.

6. Personal Injury Protection (PIP)#

PIP is MedPay’s ambitious cousin, and it is the engine of no-fault. It pays without asking about fault — but unlike MedPay it goes well beyond medical bills. It’s not a limit; it’s a bundle:

Sub-benefit	What it does
Medical	treatment, rehabilitation
Work loss	a percentage of lost wages, under a monthly cap
Replacement services	paying someone to do what you now can’t — childcare, housekeeping, driving
Funeral	a small fixed sum
Survivor’s benefit	to dependents

That third row is pure no-fault thinking. Under tort you’d have to prove someone was careless before recovering “I had to hire help.” PIP just pays a daily rate and moves on.

Concrete, from New York’s statute: the required minimum is $50,000 of “basic economic loss,” and within that it pays medical costs plus 80% of lost wages, capped at $2,000 a month.

Read those two numbers together, because they’re doing something sneaky. It’s one $50,000 pot for everything. Wage payments and medical payments come out of the same money. Three months off work at the cap is $6,000 of your medical coverage, spent on groceries. And the $2,000/month cap means anyone earning more than $30,000 a year is already underinsured on the wage side from day one.

PIP is compelled in the no-fault states, and in the “add-on” states that grant the benefit without touching your right to sue.

The fold: the coverages about someone else’s failure#

Three coverages sit in a strange position. They’re on your policy — first party — but everything they’re about is the other driver.

7. Uninsured Motorist (UM)#

The driver who hit you had no insurance at all — or fled, and was never identified. UM steps into the space where their liability coverage should have been.

Roughly one in seven U.S. drivers is uninsured, worse in some states. That’s not a rare edge case; it’s a structural feature you are buying protection against.

8. Underinsured Motorist (UIM)#

They had insurance. It wasn’t nearly enough. UIM covers the gap above their limit.

In New York this is sold as SUM — Supplementary Uninsured/Underinsured Motorists — and it’s the piece of the policy I’d now argue matters most and gets read least.

And here’s the trap. UM/UIM is a first-party contract, so your insurer owes you good faith. But the payout question is “what could you have recovered from the at-fault driver, had they been adequately insured?” — so your own insurer has to stand in the shoes of the person who hit you (that’s the actual legal phrase). And because it’s now their money, they will require you to prove the other driver’s liability, and they will dispute how badly you’re hurt.

You hold a first-party contract and have to fight a third-party fight — against your own insurer.

There’s also a wrinkle worth knowing before you buy: some UIM is written as excess (your limit stacks on top of what you already collected) and some as limits-reduced (your limit is reduced by what you collected). Same number printed on the page; up to tens of thousands of dollars of difference. It depends on state law and policy wording, so it’s worth asking rather than assuming.

9. Uninsured Motorist Property Damage (UMPD)#

The same idea for your car rather than your body, usually with its own small deductible. Not available everywhere.

Now: one crash, all nine#

Here’s the case that taught me more than the whole list above. New York, because it’s a no-fault state with well-documented numbers.

You are injured. Medical costs come to $180,000. The driver who hit you carries the New York minimum: 25/50/10. Your own policy has the required $50,000 PIP, and — because you happened to buy it — $100,000 of SUM.

Step	Who pays	Prove fault?
First $50,000 of medical and wage loss	your own insurer, PIP	❌ No. This is the entirety of what no-fault does
Remaining $130,000	PIP is exhausted	—
↳ to reach it at all	you must clear New York’s “serious injury” threshold to regain the right to sue, then sue	✅ Yes — and litigate
↳ suit succeeds. His BI is 25/50	$25,000. Full stop	his limit is his limit
↳ still short $105,000	your own SUM, if you bought it	✅ Yes — against your own insurer
Your car, say $28,000	his PD limit is $10,000 → $18,000 short. Or your collision, minus deductible, with your insurer pursuing subrogation	✅ Yes

Count what actually happened there. Nine coverages, and the one that behaved the way people imagine insurance behaves — pay the bill, no argument — covered $50,000 of a $180,000 loss.

What the case is actually teaching#

One: no-fault didn’t replace tort. It bolted a fast lane onto the front of it.

The first $50,000 was frictionless. For the other $130,000 you were returned to the tort world completely intact — liability, threshold, litigation, the other driver’s inadequate limit, your own coverage as the last line. Nothing was removed. How long the fast lane runs is the PIP limit; where the gate sits is the threshold; both are set state by state.

Which also explains why no-fault is still being argued about sixty years on. It was designed to get small claims out of the courts, and it does that. The seriously injured lose none of the old ordeal — and the lane itself, paying without asking about fault, turned out to be an excellent entrance for fraud. Both criticisms are visible in that one table.

Two: a state minimum is a floor, not a plan.

25/50/10 didn’t fail here through bad luck. It failed at ordinary numbers — one hospitalization and one mid-priced car. A state minimum is not a judgement about what’s adequate. It’s a floor, and floors are what get left alone.

(Correction, added later. This paragraph originally argued that the low floor was a deliberate trade — set low to keep as many drivers as possible inside the insurance system, since a higher floor would price the poorest out. That’s certainly the argument you hear, and I repeated it as though it were settled. When I went looking for the evidence, it didn’t hold up: states that have raised their minimums saw premium increases smaller than the national average, and no rise in uninsured drivers — most saw the proportion fall. The pricing-out story is a prediction that appears not to have come true. What actually seems to keep these numbers low is much duller: nobody updates them. California’s minimum sat at 15/30/5 from 1967 until January 2025. I wrote the whole thing up here, including who benefits from the inertia.)

Three — and this is the one that changed how I read a declarations page.

Go back and look at which coverages did the heavy lifting for the injured person. PIP: yours. SUM: yours, and optional. Collision: yours, and optional.

The compelled coverages — BI and PD — did nothing for you at all. They were never for you. They protect strangers from you.

The state compels you to protect other people, and leaves protecting yourself entirely up to you.

Which is not a contradiction once you can see the seam. Compelling someone to buy protection for strangers is politically brutal, so it gets set at a floor and left to rot for decades. Compelling — or gently defaulting — someone into protecting themselves is easy, because they actually want it. So that’s where the real coverage migrated.

Eight lines on a declarations page. Two of them are for everyone else, and they’re the only two anybody checks.

Notes and sources

tort etymology: from Latin tortus, past participle of torquere, “to twist”; via Old French tort, “wrong, injustice.” The shared root with torque, torsion, torture, contort, distort and tortellini is standard etymology, not a stretch.
New York numbers: minimum liability 25/50/10 and $50,000 of no-fault “basic economic loss” under Insurance Law Article 51, which pays medical expenses plus 80% of lost wages up to $2,000 per month. The right to sue for non-economic loss requires clearing the statutory “serious injury” definition (§5102(d)). Supplementary Uninsured/Underinsured Motorists coverage sits under §3420(f). Figures as of 2026; the SUM rules have been amended recently, so confirm current specifics rather than relying on this article.
Comprehensive / Other Than Collision: the named-perils list quoted is from a U.S. state department of insurance consumer guide to auto coverages — missiles or falling objects, fire, theft or larceny, explosion or earthquake, windstorm, hail/water/flood, vandalism, riot, contact with a bird or animal, glass breakage. Insurers and state regulators commonly gloss the coverage as “Comprehensive (Other Than Collision).”
Defence costs: in standard personal-lines and commercial general liability forms, defence is paid in addition to the limit rather than eroding it. Not universal — some policies, professional liability especially, are written with defence inside the limit.
Uninsured driver share: the roughly one-in-seven national figure is an Insurance Research Council estimate; state-level rates vary widely.

I’m learning this in public and would rather be corrected than confident. If you work in this and something here is wrong, please tell me.

First, the word tort#