The three most common risk factors for large truck accidents are:
Reckless Driving
Mechanical Failures
Driver Fatigue
Reckless Driving
Reckless driving includes (but is not limited to) excessive speed, improper lane changes, following too closely, failure to yield right-of-way, illegal turns, and failure to obey traffic signals.
Mechanical Failures
This cause of large truck accidents can involve something as simple as inoperative truck taillights that cause a rear-end collision on a dark highway, or as obvious as brake failure on a long downhill grade.
Driver Fatigue
Fatigue is called "the silent killer" because it cannot be revealed in accident scene tests, like those for alcohol or other drugs -- which surprisingly, play a statistically minor role in most large truck accidents.
According to a two-year accident report analysis by the National Transportation Safety Board, the most important measures in predicting a fatigue-related accident are the duration of the last sleep period, the total hours of sleep obtained during the 24 hours prior to the accident, and split sleep patterns.
Truck drivers with split sleep patterns get about 8 hours sleep in a 24-hour period, however, they obtain it in small segments averaging 4 hours at a time. The NTSB's research suggests that sleep accumulated in short time blocks impedes recovery of performance abilities.