Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts 2010, August 2012

Analysis Division, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration
Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts 2010: Final Version
FMCSA-RRA-12-023
August 2012

Vehicles

This chapter presents information on large trucks involved in fatal, injury, and property damage only crashes. Some of the data in this chapter come from the MCMIS Crash File, which contains data on trucks and buses in crashes that meet the SAFETYNET crash severity thresholds. MCMIS data are used for the tables on crashes by vehicle configuration (Vehicles Table 1), cargo body type (Vehicles Table 2), gross vehicle weight rating (Vehicles Table 3), hazardous materials cargo (Vehicles Table 4), and hazardous materials released (Vehicles Table 5). SAFETYNET nonfatal crashes tend to be more serious than GES nonfatal crashes, because the SAFETYNET threshold requires at least one injury involving immediate medical attention away from the crash scene, or at least one vehicle disabled as a result of the crash and transported away from the crash scene. Below is a summary of some of the vehicle information in this section:

In 2010, 3,484 large trucks were involved in fatal crashes, 58,000 were involved in injury crashes, and 214,000 were involved in property damage only crashes.

Hazardous materials (HM) placards were present on 3 percent of the large trucks involved in fatal crashes and 2 percent of those in nonfatal crashes. HM was released from the cargo compartments of 12 percent of the placarded trucks. Flammable liquids (gasoline, fuel oil, etc.) accounted for 61 percent of the HM releases from cargo compartments in fatal crashes and 42 percent of the HM releases in nonfatal crashes.

“Collision with vehicle in transport” was recorded as the most harmful event for 75 percent of the large trucks involved in fatal crashes.

Singles (truck tractors pulling a single semi-trailer) accounted for 62 percent of the large trucks involved in fatal crashes in 2010; doubles (tractors pulling two trailers) made up 3 percent of the large trucks involved in fatal crashes; and triples (tractors pulling three trailers) accounted for 0.1 percent of all large trucks involved in fatal crashes.

Vehicle-related crash factors were coded for 4 percent of the large trucks involved in fatal crashes and 3 percent of the passenger vehicles involved in fatal crashes. Brake systems and tires were the two vehicle-related factors most often coded for both vehicle types.