CACI 3903M: Loss of Use of Personal Property

Damage to a vehicle, a piece of equipment or a machine is only half the loss. The other half is the weeks the owner spent without it. California treats that as a separate, separately provable element, and CACI 3903M is where it lives.

What the instruction requires

CACI 3903M — Loss of Use of Personal Property (Economic Damage) — measures the loss as the reasonable cost to rent a similar item for the amount of time reasonably necessary to repair or replace it.

Two variables, then. A rate, and a period. Nearly every dispute under this instruction is about one or the other.

It applies even when the property was destroyed

A common defense position is that loss of use belongs only to repairable property — that once an item is a total loss, the owner is made whole by its value and nothing else. California rejected that.

Reynolds v. Bank of America held that an owner deprived of the use of a vehicle during the period required for replacement may recover for that deprivation, and drew no distinction between property that was destroyed and property that was merely damaged. The replacement period is the relevant window; the fact that there is nothing left to repair does not close it.

The clock runs on what was reasonable, not on what happened

Valencia v. Shell Oil Co. ties recovery to the period of time reasonably required for the making of repairs. That cuts in both directions, and it is worth being straight about which side each cut favors.

A plaintiff whose truck sat in a yard for seven months because a shop was slow, a part was backordered or the claim took time to resolve does not automatically recover seven months. The question is how long the repair or replacement reasonably should have taken.

Equally, a plaintiff who could not afford to replace the item promptly is not automatically limited to a short period. What is reasonable is a factual question about this item, this market and these circumstances — supply conditions for the equipment, lead times, and what a comparable substitute actually took to source.

Rental value, not lost profits

The measure under 3903M is what it would reasonably cost to rent a similar item. That is the ceiling of this element, and it is not the same as what the owner would have earned using the item.

Where a commercial vehicle or a machine was generating income, there are two candidate theories — rental value under 3903M, and lost profits under CACI 3903N. They are not additive by default. Awarding the full cost of renting a substitute and the full profit the item would have earned typically double counts, because renting the substitute is precisely what would have preserved the profit. Where both are pleaded, the analysis has to show which loss each figure represents and why they do not overlap.

Does the plaintiff have to have actually rented something?

The measure is rental value, which is why a plaintiff who made do without a substitute is not automatically out of court. But the strongest records contain both: evidence of the market rental rate for a comparable item, and evidence of what the plaintiff actually did during the period.

An invoice for a rental that was actually incurred is the easiest version of this element to prove. A rate pulled from a quotation, with nothing showing the plaintiff needed or sought a substitute, is the version most likely to be trimmed.

A worked example

• A contractor’s box truck is damaged and off the road.
• The repair reasonably takes five weeks, although the shop kept it for nine.
• A comparable truck rents locally for $1,450 a week.

Loss of use under 3903M is $7,250 — five weeks at the market rate, not nine. The four extra weeks are recoverable only if the delay itself was reasonable in the circumstances. The damage to the truck is a separate calculation under CACI 3903J, and any profits genuinely lost beyond what a rental would have preserved are a separate question again.

Where 3903M sits in the series

• CACI 3903J — damage to personal property: the lesser of repair cost or reduction in fair market value.
• CACI 3903K — loss or destruction of personal property.
• CACI 3903L — personal property having special value to the owner.
• CACI 3903M — loss of use of that property. This page.
• CACI 3903G — the real property equivalent, loss of use of real property.

They stack in the sense that damage and deprivation are different losses. They do not stack in the sense that the same dollar can be recovered twice under two headings, which is the mistake that most often gets a personal property damages model discounted.

What an economist adds

Establishing the market rental rate for a genuinely comparable item rather than the nearest thing on a rental company’s website, building the reasonable repair or replacement period from lead times and market conditions instead of from the invoice date, and keeping loss of use, property damage and lost profits separated so the total survives cross-examination.

Related: commercial litigation support · CACI 3903J damage to personal property · California economic damages. Source: the Judicial Council’s California Civil Jury Instructions.