Court Opinion

ID: 9578313
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:43:59.723952+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:25:30.903408
License: Public Domain

Deen, Judge.
This case should be decided by applying to its facts the pertinent policy provision: An insured is "any other person while using the automobile with the permission of the named insured, provided his actual use is within the scope of such permission.”
The various States take three views of this provision: (1) the liberal or "first instance permission” view, which says that if the initial use is with the permission of the named insured, then the permitee remains an insured throughout; (2) the strict view, which looks at the permission situation only at the time of the accident, and (3) the "minor deviation rule” which, applied to the employer-employee situation, modifies the strict view by saying that a minor deviation will not annul the permission. See 5 ALR2d 600 et seq. In its leading case on the subject Georgia adopted the minor deviation rule. Hodges v. Ocean Acc. &c. Corp., 66 Ga. App. 431, 436 (18 SE2d 28). "Slight and inconsequential deviations will not annul the coverage of the omnibus clause,” the requirement being "that the purpose for which the car is used at the time of the accident be a purpose stated or intended at the time the bailment is made, but slight deviations are too unimportant to have attached to them by construction the import of annulling the protective features of the policy.” Id., p. 436. To the same effect see Drake v. Gen. Acc. &c. Assur. Corp., 88 Ga. App. 408 (77 SE2d 71); Maryland Cas. Co. v. U. S. Fidelity &c. Co., 91 Ga. App. 635, 638 (86 SE2d 801).
We recognized the rule in Ditmyer v. American Liberty Ins. Co., 117 Ga. App. 512 (160 SE2d 844) where the court split 5-4, and a minority recommended the adoption of the liberal initial use rule. That was rejected, but it was pointed out that the coverage question cannot be decided under master-servant law: "Although he may have been in the owner’s employment, the issue under the permissive use or omnibus clause is not whether he was acting within the scope of his employment, as it would be if the suit were against the employer under the theory of respondeat supe*860rior. Nor is it a question of whether the deviation in going out to the drive-in beer hall was so great or substantial as to break the chain of employment until he should return to a point within its scope.” Id., p. 517.
All the cases say that "scope of permission” may be express or implied. Our only question, then, is whether the deviation which took place here could be found by a jury to have been a minor deviation, or whether as a matter of law it is complete departure from the scope of the permission granted (not just the scope of employment).
Stevens, the employee driver, testified: "I would use [the vehicle] on company business during the day, and I would take it home at night for emergency service. Q. I call your attention to December 24, 1969; did you work on that day? A. Yes, sir. Q. And when did you get off from work? A. Around lunchtime. . . Q. Why were you not driving [your own personal automobile] on this particular occasion? A. Well, I had not been home. What I’d done, I’d actually left the Randall [employer’s] shop there and went down to the service station down the road there and we just sat around and talked until I started to go home. . . Q. And you were heading home? A. Yes, sir—instead of going home, I just turned and went towards the hospital.”
It thus appears certain that Stevens was within the scope of the permission in driving the truck to Randall Brothers, and in driving it from Randall Brothers back to his home where it was always kept. On the way back home he made a detour to visit a Randall Brothers employee who was in the hospital, and since the hospital was not on the route from Randall Brothers to his house this constituted a departure from the scope of his employment. But did it also constitute a major deviation from the permissive use granted so as to avoid coverage, as a matter of law?
This question should be left to the jury, under the authority of Holland v. Sanfax Corp., 106 Ga. App. 1 (126 SE2d 442). It is quite possible that on the trial of the case this man, who has worked for an employer for 15 years and has had a company car for 10 of those years which he *861drove regularly between his home and the shop, kept at his home, serviced and had repaired, and for which he alone was responsible, may produce evidence that going by to see a sick fellow employee at the hospital on his way home was at most a minor deviation from the scope of his implied permission.
The fact that "it is the policy of the company” that certain employees take the vehicles home for use in their off time if needed (for business use) does not rule out the situation above stated. The affidavit of the employer is awkwardly worded and does not cover one of the situations shown to exist by the defendant’s deposition: that is, the use by the employee in going between his home and the shop where he worked, which was a permitted use on the day in question. Therefore, it says nothing about any requirement to go between office and home and by the most direct route, or not stopping between office and home, etc. If the hospital had been on a direct route to the home, might the employee have stopped en route? Might he stop to buy a pound of coffee? Might he go home by a longer route in order to buy bread? Or to see a sick fellow employee? Where do we draw the line, absent evidence of what this and other employees had been doing with this and like vehicles for the past 10 years? Has the company insisted on strict adherence to the "shortest route” rule? Has it given implied permission to deviations of this type in the past by knowledge and ratification of similar instances in the past? All of these are questions best left for determination after full hearing.
The trial court did not err in overruling the motion for summary judgment.

Judgment affirmed.

Hall, P. J., Eberhardt, P. J., and Pannell, J., concur. Evans, J., concurs specially. Bell, C. J., Quillian, Clark and Stolz, JJ., dissent.