Delivery vans, box trucks, work trucks, port drayage, company cars, rideshare. If the vehicle that hit you was being used for business, the claim is not the same as an ordinary fender bender.
Commercial policies carry higher limits, and the employer may be responsible for the driver independently of the driver’s own negligence.
When a driver is working at the time of a crash, the employer can be responsible for the driver's conduct. In some circumstances the employer is also independently responsible for its own conduct: hiring a driver it should not have, failing to train, ignoring a known problem, or pushing a schedule that made a safe delivery impossible.
That matters because it can open coverage well beyond what the driver personally carries.
Commercial claims are frequently layered. A single crash may implicate the driver's personal policy, the employer's commercial auto policy, an excess or umbrella policy above it, and coverage held by a contracting company that the driver was working for. In app-based work, coverage often depends on what the driver was doing at the exact moment of the crash.
The insurer is not going to volunteer the existence of a second or third policy. Establishing what coverage exists, and who was working for whom, is the part of the case that determines what recovery is actually possible.
No. The label a company puts on a working relationship is not controlling. What matters is the actual relationship: control over the work, scheduling, equipment, and how the driver was paid and supervised.
It usually depends on what the driver was doing at that moment: offline, waiting for a request, en route to a pickup, or carrying a passenger. Coverage differs at each stage, and app records are needed to establish which applied.
Not necessarily. Parking lots, loading docks, and terminals produce serious commercial vehicle injuries, and liability principles still apply. What changes is that there may be no police report, which makes early evidence gathering more important.