I’m sure most of us see pizza delivery dudes tooling along the road delivering pizzas using their own vehicles. Since they are using their personal vehicles for business, and the business is literally 100 percent driving, what sayth the Dopers if one gets into an accident? Do pizza companies offer business auto insurance to drivers? Do drivers do nothing and fly under the radar hoping they never get into an accident, otherwise their carrier may drop them like a rock?
Have you ever delivered pizza with your own vehicle? If so, what did you do to stay insured while using your private vehicle on company business?
I delivered for two years, once at a Chinese restauraunt, once at the busiest Domino’s in the southeast (thanks to a monopoly on student meal tickets) with roughly 15-20 drivers working at any given time. No one ever told their insurance company.
Really, you don’t tell your insurance company anything. If you get in a wreck, they check the police report and raise your rates accordingly. It’s not like the report says anything like “collision occured at roughly 30 m.p.h, point of impact just below the Spanky The Moose car topper.”
This was pretty common where I worked too (Round table) the couple times guys got in accidents, set pizza bag on floorboards and ditch nametag/hat and claim on the way home/to work if questioned about uniform at all.
Couple of the guys also used to refuse to use the “car topper” either. People involved in an accident with a business vehicle often see dollar signs and fat out of court settlements to avoid expensive litigation.
So what is being said here is the employer offers nothing to its employee drivers, and said employees are on their own when it comes to legally insuring their vehicles for their employer’s business.
Perhaps that’s the reason why so many of the drivers I see are using vehicles held together by rust and dried pizza paste.
Nope. The rule around the pizza shops I worked at, over the years, was that if you were in an accident, you called the store and they’d retroactively clock you out.
That said, in all the years I delivered pizza, I never knew anyone who’d been in an accident.
I am currently and insurance agent and I used to manage a pizza hut, so I can say with all honesty that though most drivers didn’t tell their insurance companies they really should have said something. If you are in a small accident your insurance company probably wouldn’t even think to ask. If you are in a big accident with a large payout of some kind they might ask around or check the mileage on your car. If you say you just drive to and from work with less than 15k miles a year and they check your odometer when it is being repaired and it shows 35k miles in the past 15 months they could refuse your claim. If they have a witness to the accident that says, “Yeah, they just delivered me a pizza and as they were pulling away they ran over that little kid.” your claim could be denied.
Delivery is also hell on your car. I would take probably around 30 deliveries per night–that’s over sixty times per night that I would have to crank up my car, not to mention all the stop and go driving from the countless stop signs, and the speed bumps in apartment complexes to train tracks or speed tables. You don’t put a new car through that.
You know, I was a pizza delivery driver in college AND I was in a wreck, and I don’t think I ever thought about it. Of course, no one was hurt in the wreck, and no other car was involved (I took a curve too sharply in the rain and slid off the road) so that may have limited the insurance company’s interest in it. In fact, I don’t even remember if I had full coverage on the car–it may have just been liability. It’s also possible that I DID tell the insurance company when I got the job, but I sure don’t remember doing that.
For the record, the car was totalled, and I quit the job (since I didn’t have a car for a while). I was completely unharmed, but if soeone had been in the passenger seat, I suspect they would have been indistinguishable from the pizza.
Domino Pizza is a giant, multi-billion $ bsiness. In an accident involved one of their franchise divers, wouldn’t they be the choice of “deep pockets”? Around here, most pizza delivey appears to be by illegal aliens, with uninsured, unregistered vehicles.
Now, the website doesn’t specifically say you must notify the insurance company that the car is used for business. That may crop up somewhere in the fine print of the application or hiring process paperwork, or it may not. But Domino’s seems to be be laying the legal framework to put the responsibility for insurance on the driver. A smaller chain might actually be a “better” target for a lawsuit, since they might be less likely to have their ducks in a row. Alternatively, there might be an argument that Domino’s or another chain wasn’t doing enough to enforce its own policies, especially if management could be proven to be undermining the policies.
Not pizza, but newspapers… I was offered insurance by the newspaper company, which cost me less then 3 dollars every 4 weeks.
I don’t have my insurance card handy, but as I recall, it says “for home or business use” or something similar. (Farmer’s Insurance)
I delivered, got in an accident (completely my fault), and it didn’t even occur to me to tell my insurance company. Not out of dishonesty–it just didn’t even cross my mind. The other party was paid, my rates probably went up a bit. I was in my 20s.
No. Hell no! I only ever kept liability insurance then, anyway. My risk probably did go up, because you do have to haul ass if you want to make a buck in pizza delivery.
I got pulled over once at about 2AM, tearing ass around side streets. The cop came up and I did the “dome light on, hands on top of the wheel” drill. He came up and I told him that pizza was getting colder. He laughed and said “Well, I figured you were a pizzeria driver or a burglar, so I had to check.” It was never a long term plan for me, so I treated it as such. I wound up in that job longer than I expected, but I never had any reason to desire a higher insurance bill while I was doing it.
Insurance couldn’t back out of a liability claim, so I bet on myself. Any insurance you pay for is a bet against yourself, so I hedged the bet a bit. I don’t feel the least bit remorseful for it.
I’m sorry for veering a little off-topic, but this question isn’t worth it’s own thread.
Does delivering permanently put a pizza smell in your car? When I pick up pizzas for the family, my truck seems to smell of pizza for days. Seems like you’d never be able to remove the smell if you delivered for a living.
You get used to it. When I delivered, I had been cooking and answering phones there for a while, so I already smelled like pizza all the time. Other people would comment that my clothes/car smelled delicious, but I just didn’t notice it at all.
We were required to have liability insurance, to be 18 or older, and to have had a drivers license in our state for at least two years. Also, if we got in any type of accident, even a minor fender bender, we had to immediately report to the hospital for a drug test. I think this discouraged some people from reporting accidents. However, it’s a reasonable policy because any injuries sustained while delivery driving could qualify you for workman’s comp.
Never delivered pizza but did use my car for work often, reported that to the ins co as about 50% of my driving was business related. They set the rate accordingly. I have since closed that business and this reminds me I should let them know hopefully that will lower my rate.