Savva, a family-owned car rental company serving Southern California, has filed a civil lawsuit against car rental marketplace Getaround Inc., the company announced on March 24. The lawsuit alleges that Getaround used fraudulent business practices to deny over 100 insurance claims by Savva for vehicles rented through Getaround's platform.

“After exhausting reasonable options for resolving its dispute with Getaround, including attempting to negotiate settlements for claims submitted as far back as May 2020, Savva finally brought the lawsuit — its only remaining reasonable option,” the company said in a statement.

“It is Savva's honest and good-faith opinion that Getaround should have approved the insurance claims alleged in the lawsuit, and that Getaround's acts and omissions alleged in the lawsuit have severely damaged Savva's business and its sustainability,” the statement continues.

A source familiar with the matter submitted this statement to Auto Rental News:

"Savva believes that some of its claims were simply abandoned by Getaround, even after months of numerous requests for status updates. Other claims were denied based on Getaround labeling them as normal wear and tear when the damage is allegedly a result of a collision. A few claims have been also denied because Getaround supposedly uses the GPS location information from their ‘Connect’ device to state that they were allegedly tracking the vehicles outside of rentals and they apparently do not allow the vehicles to be moved after a claim.

For another batch of claims, Getaround would allegedly state that they could not pay because the photos of damage sent by Savva did not contain metadata information, so they could possibly not verify that the damage indeed happened during a rental.  In short, Savva contends that through these acts and omissions, as alleged in Savva's lawsuit, Getaround has stalled over 100 claims by Savva — regularly disregarding its Terms of Service and Insurance Statement in the process."

Savva has retained and engaged the legal services of Southern California's Gonzalez Weerasuriya law firm and its partner, Suren Weerasuriya, as lead counsel to represent it through this case. The lawsuit is filed in the Superior Court of California, County of Orange, Case Number 30-2021-01189258-CU-BT-CJC.