Car insurance covers anyone driving your car with your permission.

It depends entirely on what/who the policy you have says it will cover. It is not correct to say that it just covers any old person who drives it in all situations. Whether you have full coverage or just liability doesn't matter either. Your best bet is to check with your company to see who is covered. A few examples that come to mind: Some policies state specfically that they will not cover household employees such as care givers or nannys. People try to get out of paying the high cost of having a new/young driver in the household so they conveniently "forget" to add the driver to the policy. So, some insurance companies have denied claims based on the fact that the policy holder did not report that there was another licensed driver in the household. An insurance company will typically want to know the names and info. on all the drivers in a household. I saw cases where a stellar driver had a boyfriend or girlfriend that lived with them and had a lousy driving record. DUIs and that sort of thing. In that case, an insurance company may ask a policy holder to have a named/excluded driver on the policy so that if the car is borrowed by the named/excluded they don't have to pay out. An insurance company charges you rates based on you as a calculable risk (there are other factors of course, but this is the applicable one). They cannot calculate unknowns obviously, so there may be circumstances in which just any old driver would NOT be covered. Like I said, policies and laws vary widely, so you would have to check with your insurance company. Hope this helps.