A dealership employee hit me with my own car on the lot — who is responsible?

Attorney Answer

When a dealership employee is the one behind the wheel, there are usually two possible defendants — the employee who was driving and the dealership they were working for — but the question that has to be answered first is whether you were injured, because that is what decides which body of New York law your situation falls under at all.

Your message says the contact was light and does not say you were hurt. That is not a small gap. New York treats a claim for damage to a vehicle, a claim for personal injury arising from the use or operation of a motor vehicle, and a claim against a business for what its employee did as three different questions with different rules and different deadlines. Nobody reading this page can classify your situation from the sentence you wrote, and this page will not guess. That classification — and the fault rules that follow from it — is the first thing to put to a New York attorney.

What can be said is where the duties come from. Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1146(a) states a driver's duty toward people on foot:

Notwithstanding the provisions of any other law to the contrary, every driver of a vehicle shall exercise due care to avoid colliding with any bicyclist, pedestrian, or domestic animal upon any roadway and shall give warning by sounding the horn when necessary.

That section speaks to a roadway, and a dealership lot is private property, so whether the section itself reaches your incident is a question for an attorney. Independent of the statute, a person moving a car anywhere owes a duty of reasonable care to a person standing in front of it.

Whether the dealership answers for its employee, and not just the employee personally, is governed by the long-standing rule that an employer is responsible for an employee's negligence committed within the scope of employment. That rule comes from decided cases rather than from a statute.

One New York rule points at you rather than at them, and it is worth knowing about because it was your car. Vehicle and Traffic Law § 388(1) provides:

Every owner of a vehicle used or operated in this state shall be liable and responsible for death or injuries to person or property resulting from negligence in the use or operation of such vehicle, in the business of such owner or otherwise, by any person using or operating the same with the permission, express or implied, of such owner.

If anyone or anything else was hurt or damaged while your car was being moved with your permission, that section can put the vehicle's owner in the picture. It is a reason to report the incident to your own insurer promptly rather than to treat it as the dealership's problem alone.

What you can do

1. Get examined by a doctor if you felt anything at all, and say plainly how the contact happened; a record made at the time is worth far more later than a memory of it.

2. Ask the dealership in writing for its incident report, the name and role of the person driving, and confirmation that they were working at the time.

3. Photograph the lot, the vehicle and any marks on you or on the car, and note whether any cameras cover the area.

4. Report the incident to your own insurer, because the vehicle involved was yours.

5. Keep every message from the dealership, and do not sign a release or a repair authorization that contains one.

6. Bring all of it to a New York attorney and ask them to classify the claim before any deadline is assumed.

⏱ Time limits apply. If this is treated as a personal-injury claim, CPLR 214(5) allows three years for "an action to recover damages for a personal injury except as provided in sections 214-b, 214-c, 214-i and 215", running from the date of the incident; if it is treated as damage to property, CPLR 214(4) also allows three years. Other, much shorter periods exist for other kinds of defendants and claims. Which one applies to you depends on facts this page does not have, so ask a New York attorney to fix the date — this page does not calculate it.