The driver, who should have walked away from this 90-degree
rollover, is a quadriplegic.

Design Sacrifices Drivers

Each year, too many tractor-trailer drivers are killed in crashes. Others are seriously injured.  Conventional wisdom holds that tractor trailer crashes involve such tremendous forces that it is unreasonable to expect that any driver could escape without serious injury.  This view is often shared by truckers themselves who have accepted the high risk associated with their occupation as inevitable.

For the most part, truck manufacturers, trucking companies, federal regulators and even the Teamster's, the largest of the truck driver unions, behave as though the big, very powerful tractors pulling freight across the country represent the very best in the world in terms of engineering and materials.  But safe design of the occupant space of heavy trucks has been ignored by all.  The total weight of heavy, long-haul, trucks is limited by federal regulation. 

Manufacturers and the companies that buy those trucks would rather dedicate that weight to paying cargo than to stronger cabs.  So driver safety is sacrificed to greater cargo capacity.  In fact, the design of large truck cabs ignores many basic and long-recognized principles that could protect truck drivers when their rigs crash. 

A 2-door sedan would have performed better than the truck shown above.  Historically, the public, attorneys and forensic experts have concluded from police reports or photographs that no occupant could have survived such a crash.  Often they are wrong.

Careful analysis with the application of scientific principles and tools often reveals that death or catastrophic injury resulted because a truck cab was not designed or built to be "crashworthy."

There are a number of reasons why injuries suffered by professional drivers operating heavy trucks require a different type of analysis than "crashworthiness" assessments of passenger cars, SUV's or light trucks.

First, the collision or rollover of a heavy truck involves a fairly complex series of events which tend to occur over a longer period of time.  A passenger car, for example, which left the road and came into contact with a barrier might experience a rapid deceleration resulting in an "explosion" of kinetic energy close to the driver and passengers.  A tractor trailer rig,  under similar circumstances, should be able to "dissipate" the energy in smaller, less intense "pulses" without directly affecting the occupants inside the cab.

A second important distinction is that the structures of heavy trucks in the United States have not been subject to Federal standards that apply to automobiles, SUV's and small trucks.  The destructive energy actually delivered to the cab occupant of a heavy truck may be much less than assumed because of the physical appearance of a dramatically deformed cab.

As a rule, truck drivers expect the cabs of their tractors to protect them from little more than the sun and the rain.  Those expectations can and should be higher.  An understanding of modern design techniques and sophisticated analysis using finite element modeling employed by the trucking industry establishes that truck drivers should be able to survive many crashes that currently kill or seriously injure. 

(10/28/99)