Truck Accident FAQ

What You Need to Know about Truck Accidents

Motor vehicle accidents can cause permanent debilitating injuries and wrongful death, but collisions involving large trucks present an enhanced risk to others on the road. These forty-ton vehicles may weigh as much as 25 times more than a small passenger car. The physics of collisions between vehicles with such a substantial weight disparity predictably means that those in passenger vehicles tend to suffer the most serious injuries in trucking collisions.

In multi-vehicle accidents involving semi-trucks where someone suffers a permanent debilitating injury, the debilitated party is an occupant of the other vehicle more than 95 percent of the time. Because big-rig collisions pose such a serious danger of causing catastrophic injury to other motorists, our Lexington truck accident attorneys at Goeing Law have provided answers to common questions about these potentially life-altering accidents.

How common are collisions involving truck accidents?

During a recent twelve month period, more than half a million trucks were involved in collisions, resulting in over 100,000 people being injured and 5,000 fatalities. These numbers appear to be on the rise as the number of fatalities increased by two-thirds from the previous year. Further, industry estimates indicated that the number of large trucks traveling in the U.S. increased by twenty percent during 2012. This increase in the number of tractor-trailers would be expected to result in a proportional increase in trucking accidents.

How does truck accident litigation differ from car accident litigation?

The trucking industry expects litigation involving semi-truck collisions so trucking companies are prepared when an accident occurs. There are many trucking collisions where the trucking company has investigators on the scene at the same time that emergency response teams and law enforcement agencies are investigating. Violations of trucking industry regulations are the most typical basis for liability in a trucking case so trucking accident injury attorneys must take prompt action to prevent evidence of such violations from being lost. The trucking company may repair the big-rig or repair brakes that have not been inspected as required. In some cases, a commercial carrier may even place the semi-truck back into operation so that information stored on the tractor-trailer's event recorder, which is like a black box on an airplane, is lost and unavailable as evidence of fault or causation.