They Hit Me and Left. What Now?

Short answer: report it, document it, and find out today which of your coverages responds. The driver who left committed an offense — Vehicle Code sections 20002 and 20003 set out the duties to stop and identify yourself — but that fact does not repair your car. What repairs your car is whatever you happen to carry.

The first ten minutes

1. Get any part of the plate you can. Even two characters plus a color and model is more than nothing.
2. Check for injuries in your own car before anything else.
3. Photograph everything — the damage, the position, the debris, the paint transfer, the road, and the wider scene showing where you are.
4. Look for witnesses immediately. People leave within two minutes. Ask, get a phone number, and write down what they say while they are saying it.
5. Look for cameras. Shops, homes, dashcams in the cars around you. Footage is routinely overwritten within days and nobody preserves it on your behalf.
6. Call the police and get a report number. This is the step people skip and the one that matters most later.

Which coverage pays

This is where it gets genuinely technical, and where we would rather point you at your own policy than give you a comforting generalisation.

Collision coverage repairs your car regardless of who hit it, subject to your deductible. If you carry it, it is usually the straightforward route.

Uninsured motorist property damage is designed for damage caused by a driver with no insurance — but how it applies when the other driver is never identified is a specific question with a specific answer in California, and it is not intuitive. Ask your carrier directly whether your UMPD would respond to an unidentified driver. Do not assume either way.

Uninsured motorist bodily injury is the coverage that matters if anyone in your car was hurt, and it is the one people are most glad they kept.

If your parked car was hit

Same list, minus the plate. Check whether the parking lot or the street has cameras before you move the vehicle, and photograph the position first. If a note was left, photograph the note where you found it.

Does claiming count against you?

How a carrier treats a claim where you were not at fault is theirs to explain, and “not at fault” does not always mean “no effect”. Ask before you file if the damage is close to your deductible. Ask anyway if anyone was hurt — that is not a decision to optimise.

If the car turns up later

Sometimes it does — a neighbor recognises the description, footage surfaces, or the police trace a partial plate. If that happens, give everything to your carrier and to the police rather than approaching the driver yourself. Do not accept a private cash offer to keep it off the record without thinking it through: once the damage is repaired and the claim is closed, an injury that emerges a fortnight later has nowhere to go. Let the insurers deal with each other. That is the service you have been paying for.

Want to know what your policy would actually do in this situation? Send us the declarations page and we will read the relevant lines back to you.