A fully loaded semi-truck can legally weigh up to 80,000 pounds on the Interstate System. 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, for the last 20 years, 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 is not yet federally required on new heavy trucks, and adoption remains uneven.
Forward collision warning (FCW) and automatic emergency braking (AEB) are not experimental gadgets. A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration field study followed 169 drivers operating 151 tractor-trailers across seven trucking companies for a year, collecting more than 3 million miles and 110,000 hours of naturalistic driving data. The study sampled 6,000 collision-avoidance-system activations, including automatic emergency-braking events. During the study, participating companies reported no rear-end collisions involving the vehicles in the study, and no sampled activations were associated with collisions. That is strong evidence of potential safety benefit.
Separate research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and Highway Loss Data Institute, using real-world data from Class 8 trucks operating on limited-access highways from 2017 to 2019, found that FCW was associated with a 22% reduction in the overall rate of police-reportable crashes and a 44% reduction in the rear-end crash rate. AEB was associated with a 12% reduction in overall crash rates and a 41% reduction in rear-end crash rates. In rear-end crashes, warnings or automatic braking interventions also reduced vehicle speed substantially before impact.
The NHTSA field study also found strong support among the safety managers who completed the final survey. All five respondents agreed with statements recommending the technology as standard equipment for commercial motor vehicles and recommending it to colleagues at other companies. That finding is encouraging, although it should be understood as a small end-of-study survey rather than a measure of the entire trucking industry's views.
Yet there is still no federal requirement that new heavy trucks be equipped with AEB. NHTSA and FMCSA proposed a heavy-vehicle AEB rule in 2023, but as of 2026 the heavy-vehicle requirement remains in the rulemaking process rather than in force. That is different from the federal AEB requirement adopted for certain light vehicles. For heavy trucks, the question remains whether and when the proposed safety standard will become mandatory.
I have spent my career litigating cases where a vehicle lacked an important safety system designed to protect occupants from injury. Increasingly, collision-avoidance technology can become relevant when investigating whether a truck had a safety system available to prevent or mitigate a crash and whether the decision not to use it is relevant to the circumstances of the case.
For truck accident attorneys handling this kind of litigation, this technology matters in two ways. First, it can become relevant to the standard-of-care analysis: when a safety system is commercially available and supported by evidence of crash reduction, a fleet's decision about whether to equip or use that system may warrant examination. Second, it can matter to causation and reconstruction. Event data from these systems, when preserved and available, can provide evidence of what warnings or braking interventions occurred and how the truck and driver responded.
The technology to reduce certain large-truck crashes already exists. Real-world research shows meaningful reductions in rear-end crashes for trucks equipped with FCW and AEB, and federal regulators have proposed making AEB mandatory on heavy vehicles. The question that should be asked in every boardroom, and every courtroom, is why this technology is not standard equipment on every new heavy truck.
Read Original Blog: https://www.ammonslaw.com/blog/semi-truck-crash-avoidance-technology/
Sources:
1. NHTSA, Field Study of Heavy-Vehicle Crash Avoidance Systems (DOT HS 812 280). https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/812280_fieldstudyheavy-vehiclecas.pdf
2. NHTSA, 2024 traffic safety / large-truck crash statistics. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813791
3. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Effectiveness of front crash prevention systems in reducing large truck real-world crash rates. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/bibliography/ref/2211
4. FMCSA, Heavy Vehicle Automatic Emergency Braking; AEB Test Devices, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/federal-register-documents/2023-13622
5. FMCSA, Notices and Rulemaking Documents (current rulemaking listings). https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/federal-register-documents?topics=motor-vehicle-safety
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