A fully loaded semi-truck can weigh up to 80,000 pounds. A passenger car weighs a fraction of that. When those two things collide, physics decides the outcome long before a jury ever does. In 2024, 5,340 people were killed, and 161,201 were injured in crashes involving large trucks. That is why, as a Houston injury attorney representing families hurt by defective and dangerous vehicles, I have made it my business to understand every piece of technology that can keep that collision from happening in the first place.
The good news is that the technology exists. The bad news is that it isn’t in every truck cab, and the industry has been slow to make it standard.
Forward collision warning (FCW) and automatic emergency braking (AEB) are not experimental gadgets. A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration field study tracked 169 drivers operating 150 CAS-equipped tractor-trailers across seven trucking companies for a full year, covering more than 3 million miles and 110,000 hours of driving.1 During that time, the participating fleets reported zero rear-end crashes of the type these systems are specifically designed to prevent.2 That is not a marginal safety improvement. That is a category of crash that essentially stopped happening.
Separate research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and its Highway Loss Data Institute, analyzing police-reportable large truck crashes from 2017 to 2019, found that trucks equipped with FCW and AEB experienced meaningful reductions in front-to-rear crash rates and in road-departure crashes compared with trucks that had neither system.3 The same analysis found that when these systems intervened—whether through a warning or an automatic brake application—vehicle speed dropped substantially in the seconds before impact, with AEB’s automatic braking producing the largest reductions.4
The NHTSA field study also found that fleet safety managers who used the technology for a year were not lukewarm about it. In end-of-study surveys, every one of the five participating safety managers agreed they would recommend the technology for all commercial motor vehicles in their fleet and would recommend it to colleagues at other companies.5 When the people responsible for a fleet’s safety record and insurance costs are that unanimous, the industry doesn’t have a technology problem. It has an adoption problem.
Yet there is still no federal mandate requiring FCW or AEB on new heavy trucks, though NHTSA and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration have proposed rules that would begin to change that.6 Regulation always seems to trail the injuries. It took decades of tread separations and rollovers before tire aging warnings became standard practice. The same pattern is playing out with FCW or AEB on new heavy trucks.
I have spent my career litigating cases where a vehicle lacked an important safety system designed to protect occupants from injury. Increasingly, I am seeing cases where the missing piece was a collision avoidance system that a trucking company chose not to utilize.
For truck accident attorneys handling this kind of litigation, this technology matters: it changes the standard-of-care conversation—when a proven system exists and a fleet chooses not to use it, that decision must be accounted for. Second, it changes causation analysis: event data from these systems, when preserved, can show precisely what warnings fired and how the truck and driver responded.
The technology to reduce the number of large truck crashes already exists, and the people who use it every day say it works. The question that should be asked in every boardroom, and every courtroom, is why it isn’t in equipped on every truck.
Read the original article here: https://www.ammonslaw.com/blog/semi-truck-crash-avoidance-technology/
Sources
- Grove et al. (2016), Executive Summary, p. ii, and p. 55 (“This study sampled 6,000 CAS activations from over 3 million miles and 110,000 hours of…”).
- Grove et al. (2016), p. 55 (“Overall, companies did not report, for any participating vehicles during their data collection windows, any rear-end crashes of the types CASs are designed to prevent”).
- Kidd, D. (2024, August 29). Reducing Heavy Truck Front Crash Involvement With Crash Avoidance Technology [Conference presentation]. Southeast CMV Summit. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety–Highway Loss Data Institute. Slide: “Effects on relevant crash types” (police-reportable large truck crashes per mile traveled, 2017–19).
- Kidd (2024), slide: “Speed reduction between intervention (warning or autobrake) and impact in front-to-rear crashes.”
- Grove et al. (2016), p. 55 (“all five respondents agreed with the above statements regarding CMV recommendations”).
- NHTSA/FMCSA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Docket Nos. NHTSA-2023-0021 (light vehicle AEB) and FMCSA-2022-0171 (heavy vehicle AEB test devices), cited in Kidd (2024).
