Crashing a Pickup Creates Carload of Woe
The judges should have titled the case “When is a truck really a car?” or “Be sure to read your insurance policy carefully.”
It all started with a traffic accident. On March 21, 1982, Jamie Contreras, then age 17, was driving a friend’s 1979 Chevrolet Luv pickup truck when it struck a telephone pole. A passenger injured in the accident sued.
Contreras lived with her mother and was covered by her mother’s automobile insurance policy with National Automobile and Casualty Insurance Co. The policy covered her mother, the named insured, for any car she drove, whether she owned it or not, but insured Contreras when she was driving someone else’s vehicle only if it was a “private passenger automobile.”
A Question of Definition
What is a private passenger automobile? That question is what the Court of Appeal in Sacramento County had to answer when National sued Contreras for declaratory relief.
(That is a form of lawsuit often used in insurance cases. Essentially, the insurance company says to the court, “Tell us what to do.” Instead of denying insurance coverage, and possibly being accused of bad faith, the insurance company asks the court to determine whether coverage should apply.)
The insurance policy itself was somewhat circuitous. It said a car is a car. The policy defined a private passenger automobile as a “private passenger or station wagon-type automobile.”
The court had to decide whether a pickup truck is also a car, at least for purposes of this policy.
Contreras’ attorney, John A. Young, argued that the insurance policy was ambiguous and so the case should be construed against the insurance company, which wrote the policy, after all. It is a well-settled rule of insurance law that ambiguous terms in an insurance policy should be construed in favor of coverage.
Many courts in other states had previously been asked to decide when a truck is a car, according to Young, and were about evenly split in the ways they interpreted similar policy provisions.
Young cited a 1966 California case that suggested courts should consider how a particular vehicle is used, not simply its design, when determining whether it falls into the category of a private passenger automobile.
But in the Contreras case, the court said it doesn’t matter how a car is used. Even if a pickup truck is used exclusively to carry passengers, it does not thereby become a private passenger automobile under the terms of the National Automobile insurance policy, the court said.
Policies Are Not Standard
The court decided that the words of the policy were not ambiguous at all, that any layperson would understand the definition to refer only to cars, not pickup trucks, and it ruled that coverage did not apply.
Insurance policies of different companies are hardly standard; they vary in language and interpretation. Thus it is possible that a similar provision in another policy may be interpreted differently and coverage might apply to a pickup truck in different circumstances.
To be safe, you should read your own insurance policy to see if coverage, under any circumstances, is limited to private passenger automobiles. And ask your insurance agent how your company interprets the provisions and whether the company includes any pickup trucks in the private passenger category.
Better yet, don’t let your teen-age relatives drive their friends’ pickup trucks.
Attorney Jeffrey S. Klein, The Times’ senior staff counsel, cannot answer mail personally but will respond in this column to questions of general interest about the law. Do not telephone. Write to Jeffrey S. Klein, Legal View, The Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.
