Together with truck crash survivors and the families of truck crash victims, these individuals truly understand the urgency behind our fight to save lives by improving truck safety standards. Both the NTSB and the driver survey studies point to the dangerously widespread incidence of truck driver fatigue in the U.S. trucking industry. The size and weight of trucks is also a crucial safety issue facing the industry today. Longer and heavier trucks are inherently more dangerous trucks. Ample research conducted over the last ten years has demonstrated that bigger trucks are more unstable, have crashes more likely to result in deaths and serious injuries, and cause more destruction to roads and bridges.
Heavier trucks are highly unstable and are more likely to rollover with increased weight.
Heavier trucks also have longer braking distances, severely impairing a truck's ability to avoid collisions. There is also a sharp increase in truck crash fatality rates with each extra ton on a truck. A truck weighing 80,000 pounds is more than twice as likely to be involved in a fatal crash than a truck weighing about 50,000 pounds when all other factors are equal . As the trucking industry pushes for bigger and bigger trucks to increase productivity, the motoring public is put in more and more danger by these unsafe and oversized rigs. No matter what the physical size of the truck, however, vehicle maintenance is a critical issue for the trucking industry to address.