2 days ago
7
Rob Carpenter
Thu, February 19, 2026 astatine 9:16 AM CST 12 min read
I knew we had important concerns astir trucking insurance, fixed the rising underwriting lack rates. Instant contented policies are progressively prevalent, peculiarly among the worst-performing fleets. What I recovered was a monolithic spread successful the regulatory model truthful ample that you could thrust a motortruck done it. Based connected the numbers, idiosyncratic already has. About 589,690 times.
I’ve held a CDL for implicit 25 years. I’ve managed fleets, owned fleets. I consult for Fortune 500 carriers; I’ve overseen large, multi-entity backstage equity fleets; I’ve testified arsenic an adept witnesser successful road mishap litigation; and I person spent the amended portion of my vocation wrong the compliance machinery of American trucking. I thought I understood however the strategy worked. Most would person you judge I cognize much astir the U.S. motortruck security marketplace than most. Then I started pulling that data.
An investigation of 2.8 cardinal insurer-carrier relationships successful FMCSA information reveals utmost clang concentration: the apical 5% of carriers by insurer portfolio hazard relationship for 31.9% of each crashes and 31.8% of each fatalities. The reason? No national oregon authorities instrumentality requires security companies to measure a centrifugal carrier’s information grounds earlier issuing a policy. The $750,000 national minimum hasn’t changed since 1980. The effect is simply a strategy wherever security is simply a fiscal obstruction to introduction but not a information gate.
What the information says
I analyzed 2.8 cardinal insurer-carrier relationships successful the FMCSA’s nationalist data. You tin spot my security scorecards connected my site here; each trucking bearer illustration besides includes an security hazard rating. Every progressive security filing for each interstate for-hire centrifugal bearer successful the United States. Then I scored each bearer utilizing a peer-normalized hazard model that evaluates clang severity, inspection quality, authorization stability, and compliance patterns wrong fleet size cohorts. The scores were aggregated to the insurer portfolio level.
Insurer portfolios successful the highest-risk tier, with mean hazard scores betwixt 21 and 50 connected a 100-point scale, screen conscionable 1.8% of each carriers. But those carriers relationship for 16.9% of each crashes and 16.6% of each fatal crashes successful the dataset. The weighted clang complaint per bearer successful this tier is 58.9. In the lowest tier, it’s 1.13. That’s an insane difference.
When I ranked carriers by the riskiness of their insurer’s portfolio and computed cumulative clang shares, the attraction curve was astir vertical. The apical 5% of carriers relationship for 31.9% of each crashes and 31.8% of each fatal crashes. At 25%, the curve captures 70.1% of both.
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