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Vehicle Owner Liability Most states have some statutory or common law provision for holding the owner of a vehicle liable if he has allowed someone else to use his vehicle and that person has negligently caused a crash. This can include vicarious liability for the negligence of the driver. However, some states place a cap on the amount for which the owner can be vicariously liable. See Cal. Veh. Code $17151(a) (capping permissive use liability at $15,000 per plaintiff and $30,000 per accident). In addition, the owner can often be held liable (typically without any cap) for having negligently entrusted the vehicle to a driver whom the owner knew or should have known was unfit or incompetent to operate the vehicle. The driver unfitness can be shown through, among other things, evidence of prior crashes, traffic citations and/or drunk driving convictions or his lack of a current driver's license. Often, the difficulty is in proving that the owner was aware of the driver's past, but if the owner has entrusted the vehicle to this driver for an extended period of time, there is a good argument that some investigation into the driver's history was warranted. Material taken from Personal Injury Handbook, Copyright: James Publishing...