Technology, Trucking and Personal Injury Claims

Did you know that 15% of highway deaths are due to truck accidents every year?

An accident with a truck or large vehicle will most certainly result in severe injuries and possibly even death due to the massive difference in size between trucks and ordinary vehicles.

Personal injury claims in truck accidents are specialized and should be handled by experienced, locally based, specialized law firms familiar with state laws. Learn more here.

Trucks, by their nature, are large vehicles that have limited maneuverability and stopping power. In addition, they carry weighty loads, which affect road holding and reaction time.

As with all personal injury claims, one needs to prove fault on the truck driver’s part if you want to claim any personal injury award.

Since trucking companies have widely adopted technology to assist them in their transport management, the ability for you to prove fault may well be assisted by access to those and other technologies.

Let’s look at some of the technologies and see how their potential can be harnessed.

The “Black Box”

Every commercial truck has a black box. This box records a wealth of information as the truck moves. For example, it records the speed at any point in time, how long the brakes were applied for, weather conditions and a wealth of other information.

In a personal injury case, your lawyer can insist on being given the black box records, which may well assist in proving fault.

Daily Travel Logs

Daily travel logs have been around for a while. Many of these are now kept digitally by the truck driver.

A look at these records could, for example, provide evidence that a truck driver has driven more than the allowed time over a 24 hour period, which could prove that he would have been exhausted.

This combined with the fact that his truck careered into an oncoming vehicle on their side of the road, is compelling evidence he probably fell asleep at the wheel.

Trip Inspection Records

Truck-trailer drivers are mandated to perform thorough trip inspections and record these every 24 hours that the truck is in service.

Access to these records or the fact that there are no such records can assist you in your case, especially if the driver blames the accident on mechanical failure.

 Annual Inspection Certificates

Access to the mandatory annual inspection certificates of the truck can help prove your case, especially if the lack of certificates indicates that annual inspections have not been done, thereby increasing liability on the part of the truck driver.

Dash Cams

Although not mandatory, many truck drivers have dash cams mounted. They provide great evidence of what happened in an accident scenario.

Cell Phone Records

Access to cell phone records of the truck driver may just reveal that at the time of the accident, the truck driver was busy on a phone call or was sending a text message or SMS. This helps prove that the truck driver caused the accident as he was driving whilst distracted.

Final Conclusion

Technology advances every day. With the lightning pace of artificial intelligence, there will undoubtedly be developments that assist the legal fraternity with their personal injury claims.

In the meantime, your lawyer can use the technology outlined above to help them to prove your case.