Heads Up: Business Use of Vehicles

Read your insurance policy. Business use of a vehicle, with the exception
of traveling to and from a job, is a standard exclusion. This means once
you report to work, you cannot use your car for any trip pertaining to
business operations.

In other words, using your car to take lunch is okay, but delivering goods
or making sales calls is not. You must have a policy underwritten for
business use to use your car for business.

So, for example, if you work for a major employer as a mail clerk and one
of your duties is to take the mail sacks to the post office, you must use a
company-owned vehicle for that purpose. If your boss tells you to recharge
the postage meter, then you must use his vehicle, not yours. If you work
for the Federal Government and you are asked during the work day to go from
one facility to another, it is highly questionable if you can use your own
car for that inter-office travel while clocked in. I recommend you demand
a Government car!

The bottom line is if you use your personal car for business purposes, you
are driving UN-insured.

 

I have often wondered about this. My son is interested in a pizza
delivery job where the drivers must use their own cars. My ins.
company is already very picky about how often he uses the car each
week, and how far he goes.

If it is going to raise my insurance costs, it won't be worth it for
him to have the job.

-Kirk Matheson

 

No sense in relying on generalizations. Ask your agent.

 

Absolute rubbish. All it means is that responsibility for insurance rests
on
your employer. If your employer has you do something in your own car,
their insurance policy covers you.

I did the pizza delivery game when I was younger about 20 years ago. It is
only worth it if you own a piece of shit car that cost you $600 that you can
work on yourself, and you are just going to drive into the ground. Old
Toyota Celicas and Hondas with no paint are the kind of thing you use. In
my day you used VW Rabbits, Datsun 510's, that sort of car.

If it were my son I'd use it as a learning opportunity for him, I'd go buy a
$600 beater for him, and tell him that all proceeds from
the delivery job goes to fix problems in the car and pay for car insurance.
You also should consider getting a small beater pickup truck, like a toyota
or some such, these seem to be a bit tougher for this work. Under no
circumstances ever let him drive your car. Pizza delivery really eats up
vehicles. But conversely it is fantastic for building driver skills. You
have
to learn to read maps, plan out your route to avoid traffic disruptions,
you have to learn how to make u turns in tight quarters, avoid cops who
like to seek out pizza drivers, and of course you get tons of time on the
vehicle. The extra experience and learning he could get from this kind
of work now could one day in the future save his life in traffic.

Don't worry about the insurance aspect. If it's a national delivery chain
they
will have insurance that covers it - it won't of course, cover property
damage on
the vehicle, it will only pay out to someone else if your son smashes into
their
car in the process of delivering pizza. If he wrecks his own vehicle that
is just another learning experience. And also most pizza delivery is done
with a 3 mile radius and your on the slower neighborhood roads, not driving
around on the highways. So crashes when they do happen are of the
bumper thumper, fender bender ones not the high speed ones where people
roll the vehicle and get pasted into a tree.

Ted

 

you have to learn how to make u turns in tight quarters, avoid cops who

You really have no idea how UNimportant you really are, do you??
That was one of the dumbest statements I've heard in weeks.

God Bless,
Dan'L

(retired cop)

 

Well, all the cops that I ever met who wern't retired didn't have a sense of
humor either. I guess they must train that out of you.

For the record, when I was delivering pizza I never saw a cop nor did any
other driver get ticketed when delivering either. The routes normally used
by
pizza drivers generally run most of the time in neighborhood streets which
are
hardly ever patrolled, (even today, 20 years later as a homeowner this still
ticks me off - I can count the number of times I've seen a police car drive
by the house in the last 5 years on the fingers of one hand, but I see them
almost every day on the freeway, writing speeding
tickets, and I've had cars in my driveway broken into at least 3 times
during that
time) both because the customers are in the neighborhoods, and because it is
faster to cut through 3 different neighborhoods via all the back streets to
get 2
miles than to go to the main road and go through 4 traffic lights to get 2
miles.
As a result, avoiding cops was pretty low on the priority list.

Ted

 

Which one is stupid?

The "you have to learn how to make u turns in tight quarters"
or "avoid cops who like to seek out pizza drivers"

KS

 

Straight out of "Toy Story".