Texas: Gratuitous Provision of Company Vehicle Insufficient to Bring Commute Within Employment

Where an employer gratuitously provided a company vehicle to an employee to aid in his daily travel from his residence to a large tract of fenced ranch land containing a gas lease where the employee worked, it did not automatically bring the travel within the course and scope of the employment, held a Texas appellate court. Accordingly, when the employee sustained fatal injuries in a crash as he drove to the work site, it was error for the trial court to grant his widow summary judgment on the issue of whether the death arose out of and in the course of the employment. A factual issue existed as to whether the travel and the employment were so closely related that the travel could fairly be said to have originated in the work.

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 American Home Assur. Co. v. De Los Santos, 2019 Tex. App. LEXIS 9472 (Oct. 30, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 15.01.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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