If you were a passenger in a one car accident, then the accident was not your fault. It was your driver’s. Your driver owes you the same duty of care that your driver owes to everybody else on the road. Therefore, if you are injured and your driver is at fault, and in a one car accident the driver usually is, then you may make a claim against your driver and your driver’s insurance.
I know what you are thinking: “Won’t that cause the driver’s insurance rates to go up?”. Interestingly, the answer is probably not. In Massachusetts, if you have a minor at-fault accident, which is to say the total claim, including property damage, is between five hundred ($500.00) and two thousand dollars ($2,000.00), the driver gets a three point surcharge. For a major accident, one in which the total damage is over two thousand dollars ($2,000.00), the driver gets four points. If there is serious personal injury, or even death, the driver still gets four points. As such, if you have a claim for bodily injury, there is a good chance that there is already over two thousand dollars worth of damage to the vehicle and thus the driver has already qualified for the maximum surcharge, even before a single medical bill is incurred. In addition, if you qualify to bring a bodily injury claim, then you already have over two thousand dollars ($2,000.00) of medical bills. The two thousand dollar ($2,000.00) major accident threshold has already been reached, even if you do not bring a claim for pain and suffering. As a result, bringing a claim against the driver for bodily injury rarely causes the driver’s premiums to go up at all, and when it does, it typically only causes the surcharge to increase from three points to four.