Hit by Someone Driving a Borrowed Car in Maryland? When the Car's Owner Is Responsible

In October 1992, a 26-year-old man drove his Mazda RX-7 across the center line on a Maryland road and hit Matilda Dorsey's car head on, seriously injuring her. The car had been his for only eight months. His mother bought it and transferred it to him, even though, according to the court, his parents knew he had a long string of speeding and signal violations, had run into a concrete bridge, had been excluded from the family's auto insurance at the insurer's insistence, and had a drug addiction serious enough that they had petitioned for an emergency evaluation the year before.

A Baltimore County jury found the parents liable for handing him the car. Maryland's highest court took that verdict away. In Broadwater v. Dorsey, 344 Md. 548 (1997), the court held that parents who sell or give a car to an adult child are not responsible for the child's crash when, at the time of the crash, they have no legal right to control either the car or the child.

That result surprises most people, but it is where Maryland starts: the person who owns or supplied the car is not automatically responsible for the person driving it. When the at-fault driver has little insurance and the injuries are serious, whether a second defendant can be added often decides how much of the loss is ever paid.

The starting rule: ownership alone does not create liability

Maryland's highest court has repeated this for nearly a century. In Toscano v. Spriggs, 343 Md. 320 (1996), a pedestrian crossing Route 210 in Prince George's County was struck by a Ford Thunderbird driven by someone other than its owner. The court quoted its 1930 statement of the rule: "Mere ownership of a car does not impose liability for injuries caused in the driving of it."

Maryland also does not follow the "family purpose doctrine" that some states use to make the head of a household answer for family members who drive the family car. Toscano said so directly.

That does not end the inquiry. Maryland law offers several other routes to the owner, and in a serious case each one is worth checking.

Route 1: the driver was doing the owner's business

Maryland presumes that the person driving a car is the owner's agent, acting within the scope of that relationship. If the presumption holds, the owner answers for the driver's negligence just as an employer answers for an employee.

The presumption is real, but it can be defeated. In Toscano, the only evidence of the trip's purpose was that the driver was taking a teenager to his job in Georgetown. That trip benefited the teenager, not the owner, so the court held the presumption was "conclusively rebutted." The court also drew a line that matters in every borrowed-car case: "Proof of permissive use is not the equivalent of proof of agency." Letting a friend borrow your car is permission. Sending someone to run your errand in it is agency.

This route is strongest in work-related crashes. A delivery driver, a crew member in the company pickup, or an employee running an errand for the boss is usually doing the owner's business, and the company can be held responsible along with the driver. The facts of the trip decide it, so they need to be pinned down early.

Route 2: the owner handed the keys to someone they knew was dangerous

Negligent entrustment is a claim against the owner for the owner's own carelessness: giving the car to someone the owner knew, or had reason to know, was likely to drive in a way that put others at risk.

Maryland's intermediate appellate court described the kind of proof that works in Woolridge v. Abrishami, 233 Md. App. 278 (2017). It pointed to cases with repeated moving violations, a revoked license, and in one case an employer that let a driver with four recent convictions and a heavy drinking problem operate its gasoline truck. The court also repeated an important limit: when the danger is shown through past conduct, "it must be conduct so repetitive as to make its recurrence foreseeable." In Woolridge itself, an 18-year-old with a clean record and one minor prior incident was not enough.

The leading example of a claim that succeeded is Kahlenberg v. Goldstein, 290 Md. 477 (1981). The evidence allowed a jury to find that a father gave his son a car despite a record of ten moving violations and a license revocation, and an injured passenger's verdict against the father was upheld. Broadwater later explained that Kahlenberg involved a son who was still a minor under the law at the time, which is why the father still had the right to control him.

That is the key to Route 2 in Maryland: the owner or supplier must have had the right to permit or prohibit the use of the car at the time of the crash. An employer that lends out its trucks has that right. So does a parent whose minor child drives the family car. A parent who gave an adult child the title usually does not.

Route 3: the owner was in the car

An owner riding as a passenger is treated as keeping the right to control the car, so the driver's negligence can be imputed to the owner. Ordinarily it cannot be imputed to an owner who was not there, as the Court of Special Appeals (now the Appellate Court of Maryland) explained in Mackey v. Dorsey, 104 Md. App. 250 (1995).

What usually does not work: stolen cars

Mackey also shows where the routes run out. A driver left his keys in a running car on a D.C. street, and a woman he was giving a ride to slid behind the wheel and crashed into a Metrobus. The court held that a stolen car is not "entrusted" to anyone, and that the taker was not the owner's agent. Even if leaving the keys in the ignition was careless, the court treated the thief's driving as an independent intervening cause. Stolen-car claims against owners are hard to win in Maryland.

Maryland at a glance

D.C. is different. There, a statute makes a car's owner responsible for a driver who had the owner's consent, and the owner has to disprove consent. We explain that rule in our post on borrowed-car crashes in D.C.. If your crash happened near the line, where it happened can change who is responsible.

Even when the owner is not liable, the owner's insurance may be

Liability and insurance are separate questions. Most auto policies cover anyone driving the car with the owner's permission, and Toscano noted that the owner's insurer was already anticipating that fight: a claim that the driver was a permissive user covered by the owner's policy. So even when the owner personally owes nothing, the owner's policy may be the main source of payment.

When that coverage falls short, your own policy may fill part of the gap. See our explainers on Maryland PIP and on what happens when the at-fault driver has little or no insurance.

What this means if you were seriously hurt

• Find out who owns the car and why it was being driven. The police report lists the owner; the purpose of the trip usually decides an agency claim.
• Look at the driver's history. Negligent entrustment depends on what the owner knew: driving records, prior crashes, and the relationship.
• Identify every policy. The driver's, the owner's, any employer's commercial policy, and your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage can all be in play.
• Watch the clock. Most Maryland injury claims must be filed within three years, and claims involving government vehicles have earlier notice requirements.

These questions matter most in brain injury, spinal injury, and wrongful death cases, where a single minimum policy will not come close to covering the harm.

If you or a family member was seriously hurt by someone driving a car they did not own, call Posey Lebowitz at (202) 524-0123 or contact us online for a free consultation. We handle crash cases throughout Maryland, D.C., and Virginia.

This is general information, not legal advice about your case.