Uber, Lyft, and Waymo Accidents in Miami: Who Pays and Who Is Liable

Miami now has three kinds of ride on its streets: an Uber, a Lyft, and a Waymo with no one in the driver's seat. All three can be involved in a crash, and the legal path afterward differs more than most people expect. With rideshare, the central questions are which insurance tier applies and whose policy pays. With a driverless vehicle, the case changes character entirely, because there is no driver to be negligent. Here is how each works under Florida law. 

What insurance applies in an Uber or Lyft accident in Florida?

Florida's rideshare statute requires transportation network companies to carry insurance that scales with what the driver was doing at the moment of the crash. When the app is off, the driver is a private motorist and only personal coverage applies. When the app is on and the driver is waiting for a ride request, an intermediate tier applies, with statutory minimums well above ordinary personal limits. Once a ride is accepted and through the entire trip with a passenger aboard, coverage of at least one million dollars applies for death, bodily injury, and property damage.

Those tiers are why the first fact investigated in every rideshare case is the app status at the moment of impact. The same collision can be worth very different things depending on whether the driver had accepted a trip thirty seconds earlier, and the trip data preserved in the app usually answers the question definitively. The intermediate tier carries statutory minimums of fifty thousand dollars per person and one hundred thousand per incident for injury, well above what most private drivers carry, and the difference between tiers is frequently the difference between a capped recovery and a fully compensated one. 

What if you were hit by a rideshare car rather than riding in one?

The tiers protect more than passengers. A pedestrian, cyclist, or other motorist struck by a rideshare vehicle can reach the same coverage that applies to the driver's status at the time. Injured passengers, for their part, are rarely at fault by definition, which makes coverage, not liability, the main battleground in their claims. One caution: the companies' policies handle uninsured motorist coverage differently than personal policies do, and a passenger's own household auto policy can sometimes provide an additional layer. Sorting the coverage stack early is much of the value a lawyer adds in these cases. Florida's no-fault system adds one more layer: personal injury protection benefits pay initial medical expenses regardless of fault, but they are limited, and serious injuries move quickly past them into the liability coverage described above. 

Why is a Waymo crash legally different?

A Waymo operates with no human driver at all. Ordinary car cases are built on driver negligence: a person failed to use reasonable care. When software is driving, the claim shifts toward product liability, the body of law that holds manufacturers responsible for defective products. The questions become whether the driving system performed as a reasonably safe design should, whether it failed to detect or respond to what a competent human driver would have handled, and whether warnings and operational limits were adequate.

That shift matters practically. Product cases proceed against well-resourced corporate defendants, turn on engineering evidence and vehicle data rather than witness accounts of driver behavior, and can support broader damages where conduct warrants. Waymo's service has been carrying public riders across Miami since early 2026 and now operates on the highways, so these are no longer hypothetical questions for this city. The service began in a limited area covering neighborhoods like Brickell, Wynwood, and Coral Gables, then expanded across the city and onto Interstate 95 and the major expressways, which means highway-speed incidents are now part of the picture.

What does the Tesla Autopilot verdict mean for driverless cases?

Florida already has a landmark. In Benavides v. Tesla, a Miami federal jury in 2025 found that a driver-assistance system shared responsibility for a fatal Florida Keys crash, apportioning a third of the fault to the manufacturer alongside the human driver and returning a nine-figure verdict that included punitive damages. The trial court has since denied the manufacturer's post-trial motions, and an appeal is expected. Whatever happens on appeal, the case shows Florida juries will treat automated driving as a product to be judged, not an act of God, and it supplies the template for how a fully driverless claim would be built: through the system's own data, its design decisions, and its performance against what safe driving requires.

Who can be liable in an autonomous vehicle case?

Potentially several parties: the company that designed and operates the driving system, the vehicle manufacturer, the companies handling fleet maintenance and readiness, and, where a human safety driver or remote operator played a role, that person's employer. Part of the early work is preserving the evidence that sorts this out, because an autonomous vehicle records its own crash in extraordinary detail, and that data sits in corporate hands from the first minute. Comparative fault applies here as everywhere in Florida negligence law, and expect the defense, human or corporate, to argue the injured person's own conduct; in an autonomous case that argument gets made by engineers with telemetry, which is one more reason the plaintiff's side needs the data early. 

What should you do after a rideshare or robotaxi crash? 

Get medical attention and document everything: photographs, witness names, and, in a rideshare, screenshots of the trip screen showing the driver, route, and time. Report the crash in the app, which creates a record with the company. Do not give recorded statements to any insurer before advice. And move promptly: Florida allows two years for negligence claims, fault is now apportioned under a rule that bars recovery for anyone found more than half responsible, and preservation letters for vehicle and app data are most effective when they arrive early.

Salomon Smith PLLC represents people injured in rideshare and autonomous vehicle crashes across South Florida, from coverage-tier disputes to product claims. If you were hurt in a ride or by one, call
(305) 297-1018 for a free consultation, or learn more about our personal injury practice.

This article is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice.