Having an autonomous semi-truck on the highway, with the safest technology imaginable, is still far more dangerous than having one less truck on the road.
The charts above are from two studies: The first is from the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety. The second is from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Over 4,700 people died in accidents involving large trucks in 2021. Large trucks are defined as vehicles weighing 10,000 lbs or more. That number comes from the Insurance Institute, while the number from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is actually higher by 1,000 deaths.
If you’re more of a hands-on learner, next time you’re on the highway, just count the number of billboards featuring lawyers advertising specifically for truck accidents. They are everywhere. This is both a tragedy and big business.
Werner was recently hit with a $100 million verdict for an accident that, unfortunately, resulted in the death of a child. In this accident, the Werner driver was driving under the speed limit and was hit head-on by a car that skidded out of control into the Werner vehicle. It’s unclear what more the driver could have done to prevent that accident or, at minimum, what an autonomous truck would have done differently.
Regardless of fault, if you get into an accident with a truck, the truck is going to win. If you force a truck to stop short, you are putting a lot of faith in the driver’s brakes to stop 80,000 lbs of momentum.
Trailer manufacturer Wabash National was hit with a $450 million punitive damages verdict when a drunk driver, not wearing a seatbelt, drove into the back of a trailer they had manufactured. The only thing that could have prevented that accident from happening is for that truck to have magically disappeared. A robot driver would have had no impact on the tragic outcome of that accident.
The value of intermodal shipping is that it’s the only form of transit that gets the same amount of goods from point A to point B while taking a truck off the road for the vast majority of miles in-between. If you are a shipper and have the ability to convert a meaningful amount of your business from Over-The-Road (OTR) to Intermodal (Truck-Rail-Truck) traffic, that conversion can save lives.
Please read this article to learn more about how some of the largest truckload carriers are using IMDL to protect themselves from liability and improve their bottom line.
This blog post was adapted from a presentation given in November 2023 at Loyola University Chicago. For the full original presentation, you can watch it on YouTube by following this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV3NocGBszU.