Vehicle Use Policies & Learning from Experience

By R. Bruce Wright, CPCU

One of the common suggestions Synebar consultants make when visiting systems is that everyone should have a written vehicle use policy. Such policies should cover all of the issues related to the use of company vehicles, including such things as:

Requirements for daily safety inspections of the vehicles prior to the vehicles being driven
A requirement that employees obey all state and federal driver safety laws, signs, etc.
Your position on the personal use of company vehicles while on duty as well as the personal use of company vehicles after the employee gets home
A ban on passengers during work use (other than employees, contractors, or others involved in the work)
Your policy regarding use of vehicles for vacation or extra curricular work, i.e. side jobs
Any specific safe driving rules such as those governing seat belt use and cell phone use
A list of items you might prohibit from vehicles, such as firearms, alcohol, drugs, non-employee passengers, or radar detectors.
Any requirements you have for protection of the vehicle while it is in control of the driver, such as to require that the vehicle be parked under cover or be locked when parked

We also encourage systems to regularly revisit and review these policies to ensure that they are up to date as well as to make any additions or changes that are supported by management. The revised policy should then be introduced at a safety meeting and distributed to all drivers.

Most of you have heard all this from us before, so why again now? Well, in accordance with our commitment to help you learn from things that go wrong, to learn from experience (Especially other peoples’ experience which is far less painful!) here’s a lesson we can learn from an unlucky system that recently had an “experience” that led to a claim. The story is true; the names have been omitted to prevent identification while the claims process proceeds.

Imagine yourself in this scenario. One evening you are sitting home relaxing after a hard day at work as the Operations Manager for a distribution system. You are watching a game on TV when the phone rings. It is one of your men, Joe, who is the serviceman on call that night.

“Boss,” he says, “I’ve got a problem. I was just finishing dinner at the the Main Street Café when dispatch called me on an outage. I left right away, got the problem solved, and headed back home. On the way, a car coming the other way swerved left of center. There was a ditch on the right, so I juked left to miss him. Just then, he realized where he was and swerved back to his side. We hit head on, but on his side of the road and the police say since he said I was left of center not him, it’s my fault.”

“Was anyone hurt? Are you okay?” you ask.

“Well, I am fine, I had my seatbelt on. The other guy is complaining about his back, but he seems okay to me. The real problem is my girlfriend. She wasn’t using her belt and hit the dashboard pretty hard. They are loading her into the ambulance now and the squad’s taking her to the hospital. They say she’s broken her thighbone.”

In the end, the injuries were serious and there was no evidence that the other vehicle ever came into our driver’s lane. The system’s policy will have to cover the other car, the other driver’s injury claim, the collision loss to our truck, and most seriously, the major injury to the passenger in our truck, including many thousands of dollars in medical and other costs.

So, what’s the lesson here? Your vehicle use policy should be clear in not permitting passengers like this in work vehicles while on work business, not ever. But will a policy alone protect you? Not likely. To make it work, you need to review the rules with all drivers regularly, explaining the reasons for each rule and giving examples (Like this one!) of what can happen and what it can cost if they are not followed. And most importantly, management should model the behavior, following all the rules and showing by their example just how important the rules are.