Texas: Company-Supplied Vehicle Insufficient to Bring Worker’s Fatal Accident Within Employment

The fact that an employer provides an employee with a company-owned vehicle is not sufficient, absent additional factors, to bring the employee's travel within the course and scope of the employment, held a Texas appellate court. That the deceased employee may have been driving a friend to meet with the business owner, in hopes that the friend might be offered employment, did not sufficiently tie the travel to the employment as to allow recovery of death benefits for the employee's survivors. The court noted an important exception to the going and coming rule: when the employer provided transportation as part of the employment contract. The court stressed, however, that even in a situation as that in the instant case, where the employer provided the employee with a pickup truck for use both within and without the employment, the injury or death still had to originate in the employment. Here that was not the case, said the court.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Steen v. Tex. Mut. Ins. Co., 2019 Tex. App. LEXIS 7986 (7th Dist. Aug. 29, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 15.03.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see