Sharing the road with large semi-trucks can be very dangerous, especially for drivers in sedans and other small vehicles, as reports have shown that these trucks cause a disproportionate amount of fatal accidents.
When looking at the Indiana accident data from 2012, one can see that only 4 percent of the vehicles involved in accidents were trucks. However, these trucks accounted for 11 percent of the vehicles that were involved in deadly crashes.
You can also see the same trend illustrated by looking at the fatal collision rate. For every 1,000 collisions, large trucks were outranked by only one other type of vehicle. The only thing more frequently deadly was a motorcycle.
However, when ranked by type, commercial vehicles came in with the top fatality rate, sitting at 10.2. It’s important to note that large trucks are lumped into this category, but not every commercial vehicle involved in a deadly crash was a truck. Still, the rate for commercial vehicles was nearly twice the rate for highway department vehicles, which came in at 5.4 for every 1,000 collisions.
For single-vehicle accidents, large trucks tended to be safer. For most vehicles, 30 percent of the deadly crashes involved only one car, but just 10 percent of the fatal accidents with trucks involved just those trucks alone.
These statistics show that trucks cause fatal crashes more often than most vehicle types, and they also show that other drivers are more often killed by those trucks, rather than the fatality being the semi driver.
If you’ve been injured or lost a loved one, look into your legal right to compensation.
Source: State of Indiana, “Indiana Crash Facts,” accessed June 17, 2015
