While large trucks comprise just 3% of the vehicles on the road, they are involved in over 25% of all passenger vehicle occupant deaths in multiple-vehicle crashes.
Yet car occupants are not the only people with high risk factors for death or serious injury in large truck crashes. Over 700 truck drivers also die each year when they get behind the wheel.
- According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the average cost per large truck crash involving an injury is $217,000.
- The average cost per large truck crash involving a fatality is $3.54 million.
- The total cost of all large truck crashes in the U.S. is over $ 34-billion per year. This constitutes a cost of $3,894,096 per hour.
- Trucks weighing 80,000 pounds are more than twice as likely to be involved in a fatal crash than a truck weighing 50,000 pounds.
- A 100,000-pound truck travels 25% further after the driver steps on the brakes than will an 80,000-pound vehicle. And a 120,000-pound truck travels 50% further than an 80,000-pound vehicle.
- Heavier trucks have increased brake temperatures when traveling downhill. This may lead to total brake failure and runaway crashes.
- Heavier trucks have a higher center of gravity, and are more likely to roll over.
Large truck accidents kill and injure over 150,000 Americans each year. If you're hurt in a rollover, jack-knife, rear-end collision or other accident with a "semi" tractor-trailer, an experienced personal injury lawyer may be able to help.
The risks to occupants of passenger cars in truck accidents are so great, nearly 78% of the people killed and 84% of the people seriously injured in 2-vehicle crashes involving a passenger vehicle and a large truck are occupants of the passenger vehicle.
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.
Of those, speeding alone (whether exceeding the speed limit or driving too fast for conditions) accounts for 20% of all the fatal crashes involving large trucks and over 17% of the injury accidents. Speeding is usually the cause of rollover and jack-knife accidents.
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
Driver fatigue is a critical factor in over 30% of heavy vehicle accidents. 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.
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