That makes the company pretty lucky. Sure, accidents with injuries are rare, but what happens when they do occur? According to ISO, a data provider to insurance companies, about 2 percent of bodily injury liability insurance claims in the United States are for more than $300,000; in the State of New York, it’s 3 percent.

For brain damage in a vehicular accident, the median jury award in 2008, the most recent year for which data was available, was $289,793, according to Jury Verdict Research, which compiles the data and publishes it. For leg injuries, the median was $192,775.

If you think this sort of thing would never happen to you, keep in mind that if you don’t own a car, you’re probably a bit out of practice as a driver. Even if you’re careful, there are scores of jaywalkers to dodge in New York, where Zipcar has a lot of cars. Many of them are quite well off and would want their salaries replaced if you injured them gravely.

And if you’re in or near Boston, another big Zipcar city, you’re contending with the region’s aggressive drivers, all while navigating a street grid that seems to have been laid out according to the paths made by meandering animals or the American Indian hunters who chased them hundreds of years ago.

So let’s say there’s a million-dollar judgment against you. Will the lawyer for the person you have hurt or the family of someone you have killed settle for the $300,000 that Zipcar covers and then simply go away?

They might if you have no assets and seem unlikely to acquire any. Otherwise, beware. “If you have a young Wall Street stockbroker or someone with a really nice six-figure income or has big future earning potential, it is going to be a different case,” said Steven M. Gursten, a lawyer who has won the largest jury verdict for auto accident victims in Michigan in four of the last eight years. “In 16 years of doing this every single day, I’ve had a handful of doctors and others with multimillion-dollar houses and $50,000 in policy limits.”

Sure, you could declare bankruptcy and hope that keeps a lawyer from garnishing your wages from here to kingdom come. “But at that point, you’ve given up control of the situation and your life is in someone else’s hands,” said David Deehl, a lawyer in Miami who has led American Bar Association seminars for other auto accident specialists. “The bottom line is that it is not safe to assume that people will all go away. Some lawyers are stubborn, zealous advocates.”