What if your robotaxi operator goes out of business?

Every robotaxi ownership pitch, ours included, leads with the same reassurance: you hold the title. It is true, it matters, and it is the single most important structural fact about how you own the car.

It is also not the question. The question is what happens on the Tuesday morning when the company operating your car stops answering email — because your car is a physical object, sitting behind someone else's gate, plugged into someone else's charger, unlocked by someone else's credentials. Title tells you who wins that argument. It does not tell you how long the argument takes, what it costs, or what condition the car is in when it ends.

This has already happened twice — to car owners, not tech companies

The instructive precedents are not autonomous-vehicle companies. They are the two platforms that put ordinary people's cars to work earning money, and then failed with those cars on the platform.

HyreCar rented owners' vehicles to gig drivers. It filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on February 24, 2023, listing $10.69 million in assets against $15.22 million in liabilities, and announced a sale process backed by $5 million of debtor-in-possession financing from Holmes Motors (per the company's February 27, 2023 announcement and its Form 8-K). The assets were ultimately sold under Section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code to Getaround, a deal that closed May 16, 2023 for $9.45 million.

Then the acquirer failed too. In February 2025, Getaround wound down its own US car-sharing operations. Its own owner-facing notice is the document worth reading: new US rentals were not accepted after February 11, 2025; rentals already in progress were supported through February 13, 2025; owners were told to retrieve keys "as soon as possible" and to disable the immobilizer before uninstalling the company's hardware from their cars. On money owed, the notice is blunt — because of "the Company's cash position, it will not be making payments to claimants (owners with a claim submission)," with those claims instead "addressed through the wind-down process" (Getaround, "U.S. Wind-Down: What Owners Need to Know").

Note the order of operations in that table, because it repeats: the revenue stops before the car comes back, and the money you were already owed is the last thing to be resolved, if it is resolved at all.

Why "you hold the title" is necessary but not sufficient

Direct personal title is genuinely better than the alternatives — it is why we structure ownership the way we do, and why we wrote a whole post on fractional structures versus owning the car outright. If you own an LLC membership interest in an entity that owns a car, an operator failure is an entity-level mess. If you own the car, it is a possession problem. A possession problem is much better. It is not nothing.

1. Possessory liens

A depot performs labor on your vehicle — cleaning, charging, inspection, maintenance. In Florida, Fla. Stat. §713.58 creates a lien "in favor of persons performing labor or services for any other person, upon the personal property of the latter upon which the labor or services is performed." The statute is possession-based in a way that cuts both directions: the lien "is released, relinquished, and lost by the removal of such property" — and removing the property without paying or obtaining written consent is a misdemeanor.

Read those two clauses together and you have the exact reason a distressed operator does not open the gate: letting your car leave extinguishes the only leverage it has over an unpaid balance. We have found no Florida decision applying §713.58 to a robotaxi depot — the statute predates the category by generations — so treat the application as an unsettled inference from broad statutory language, not a settled holding. The prudent assumption is that it reaches a depot, and the prudent response is a contract that disclaims it.

2. The automatic stay

If the operator files for bankruptcy, 11 U.S.C. §362(a)(3) stays "any act to obtain possession of property of the estate or of property from the estate or to exercise control over property of the estate." Your car is not property of the estate — you own it — but it is property in the estate's possession, and self-help retrieval is exactly the sort of act the stay is written to freeze. The route is cooperation from the debtor or a motion for relief from stay under §362(d), which the court may grant "for cause." Separately, §542(a) runs the other way: it obliges entities holding estate property to turn it over to the trustee. Your job is to establish clearly which category your car is in — which is far easier when the contract, the title, and the operator's own records all say the same thing.

3. Everything that isn't the car

The vehicle is the recoverable asset. The rest generally is not. Earnings the operator collected but had not yet paid you are an unsecured claim in line behind secured lenders and priority creditors — the Getaround notice's "will not be making payments to claimants" is what that looks like in practice. Deposits sitting in the operating account are in the same position unless they were contractually segregated. And insurance is the quiet one: coverage arranged by the operator can lapse with the operator, while your car is still sitting on its lot.

The eight clauses to demand before you sign anything

This is the practical output. Any operator — depot, fleet manager, or platform — should be able to point to language covering all eight. If they cannot, that is your answer.

• Title never transfers. Explicit words saying the operator acquires no ownership interest in the vehicle at any time. Not implied — stated.
• No lien on the vehicle. An express waiver or disclaimer of any statutory, contractual, or possessory lien. This is the clause that answers §713.58, and it is the one most often missing.
• A short pickup notice period. Thirty days or less to get the car back after you terminate. A 90-day notice period is a 90-day hostage clause in a failure scenario.
• Month-to-month, no minimum term, no early-termination penalty. Your ability to leave cheaply is the thing that gets tested first when an operator is in trouble.
• A named retrieval process. Who hands over keys and access credentials, and how, if the office is closed. Vague answers here become expensive later.
• Insurance that is documented, not described. Ask for the certificate. Confirm what covers the vehicle while it is parked on the operator's property and not earning.
• Stated treatment of collected-but-unpaid earnings. How often the operator pays out, and whether owner funds are segregated from operating funds. Payout frequency is a risk control, not an administrative detail.
• A written wind-down provision. What happens to deposits and vehicles if the operator ceases operations — and be clear-eyed that this clause is the weakest of the eight, because it is a promise payable in cash by a company that has run out of it.

Two diligence steps beyond the contract. Confirm the entity actually exists and is active in its state registry — in Florida that is Sunbiz, and the entity on the signature line should match. And ask whether the operator will show you the agreement before you pay anything. An operator that will not show you the terms until after your money has moved has told you something.

Applying all eight to us

Fair is fair. Here is where DockDuty's Founding Reservation Agreement (v2.2, dated 2026-08-09) lands, quoted rather than paraphrased.

On title, §4.3: "Owner retains title to Owner's vehicles at all times; nothing in this Agreement or any Service Agreement transfers any ownership interest in any vehicle to DockDuty." On lock-in, the same section commits the future Service Agreement to being "month-to-month with no minimum term and no early-termination penalty." On the terms you have not seen yet, §5.2 sets a floor that agreement must meet — including "service-termination and vehicle-pickup notice periods not exceeding thirty (30) days" and "no unilateral amendment of pricing or termination terms" — and gives you a full refund plus 60 days of held order-book position if what we present materially deviates from it. On failure, §3.3: if DockDuty "ceases operations," we "will refund all outstanding Deposits in full, automatically, within thirty (30) days."

We are also pre-launch, which is its own honest disclosure: there are no Cybercabs on our network today. Depot #1 is targeted to open in Greater Orlando in Q4 2026 with 50 founding stalls, no depot lease is executed yet, and the agreement says so in its recitals rather than burying it. We operate in Florida under TNC registration per Fla. Stat. §627.748, and the car stays titled in your home state — which, as the FAQ below notes, is a fact about ownership, not about which state's possession rules apply to a car physically parked in Orlando.

Frequently asked questions

If I hold the title, can't I just take my car back?

Title settles who owns the car, not who is holding it. In Florida, someone performing labor or services on personal property has a statutory possessory lien under Fla. Stat. §713.58, and that statute makes removal without payment or written consent a misdemeanor. If the operator files bankruptcy, §362(a)(3) stays acts to obtain possession of property from the estate, so the route runs through cooperation or relief from stay under §362(d). You win that fight. You do not skip it.

Has a car-sharing platform actually failed with owners' cars on it?

Twice, in the same lineage. HyreCar filed Chapter 11 on February 24, 2023 ($10.69M assets, $15.22M liabilities) and sold its assets under §363 to Getaround, closing May 16, 2023 for $9.45M. Getaround then wound down US car-sharing in February 2025 — no new US rentals after February 11, in-progress rentals ending February 13, and open owner protection-plan claims left unpaid because of the company's cash position. Neither was an AV company, which is the point: the risk sits in the operating company, not the technology.

What contract terms protect a robotaxi owner if the operator fails?

The eight above: title never transfers; express lien waiver; pickup notice of 30 days or less; month-to-month with no minimum term or early-termination penalty; a named key-and-credential retrieval process; documented insurance covering the parked vehicle; stated treatment of collected-but-unpaid earnings and whether owner funds are segregated; and a written wind-down provision — understanding that the last one is a cash promise and therefore the weakest.

Does the title being in my home state change anything if the depot is in Florida?

Not for ownership — your certificate of title governs that, and the car stays titled in your home state. It can matter for a dispute over possession, since lien and self-help rules are state law and generally follow where the property physically sits. Read the governing-law and venue clauses, and ask where the car will actually be parked. See also our explainer on owning a robotaxi in a state you don't live in.