Roughly three million tractor-trailers move goods on American highways on any given day, and the danger they create is measured in wreckage that smaller vehicles rarely survive. Large trucks make up five per cent of the vehicles in the United States but play a role in ten per cent of fatal accidents, and more than five thousand people are killed each year in crashes involving them.
That imbalance is why car accident attorneys are often called after truck wrecks, when the damage is already done and the evidence can decide whether a family gets answers. A fully loaded eighteen-wheeler can weigh eighty thousand pounds, and at sixty-five miles per hour it can travel the length of two football fields before it stops after the brakes are slammed. Victims are usually the people in smaller cars, not the drivers of the rigs.
The risk has a name when a car rear-ends a tractor-trailer: underride. The lower half of the car can wedge beneath the trailer while the upper half is sheared away or mangled, which is why rear-impact guards, known as Mansfield bars, became standard after actress Jayne Mansfield died in 1967 when a Buick she was riding in crashed into a tractor-trailer. The industry has resisted side barriers on cargo trailers in the United States, citing cost.
The safety record is not just theoretical. In 2009 in Oklahoma, a tractor-trailer failed to slow for traffic and crushed a Hyundai Sonata and a Kia Spectra, killing ten people. In 2023 near Chandler, Arizona, Danny Glen Tiner was driving an eighteen-wheeler at sixty-eight miles an hour when he became distracted by a TikTok video on his phone and plowed into stopped traffic. He later pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison.
There is also a hard limit on the road itself. A 2003 federal law says truckers cannot drive their routes for more than eleven hours a day, a rule meant to reduce fatigue in a system where half a million or so large-truck accidents happen each year and many occur on weekdays, often at night. Most of those crashes are not fatal, but when they are, the victims are overwhelmingly the people in the smaller vehicle. That is the answer families are looking for after a truck wreck: not just what happened, but why the law, the vehicle and the driver all failed at once.
