A new highly controversial 3-part news segment produced and aired by CNBC has been taking heat from the trucking industry due to claims it makes about truck safety, accidents, and who’s to blame for fatalities in truck crashes.

The segment begins with a shocking statistic, “up to 4,000 people killed out there every single year.” The death toll is then compared to a commercial airliner crashing every Friday of every week of every year. According to the NHTSA, that number is accurate, but it wasn’t the concrete number that ruffled feathers – it was the implication that appeared to some to accompany it.





“Your piece painted a picture where every fatality in a truck-involved crash was the fault of the truck driver,” wrote Bill Graves, President and CEO of the ATA in a letter to CNBC. “This just simply is not true.”

The ATA may have seen the message as anti-trucker due to a few other statistics as well. The segment claims that there are currently over 2 million trucks on the road that are dangerously unsafe. The reasoning behind that number comes from data that says that 20% of trucks inspected in 2013 had mechanical problems. The voiceover says that trucks “had problems like faulty brakes or bad tires and shouldn’t be on the road at all.” It appears that they extrapolated that since 20% of trucks inspected had mechanical problems, it must be true that 20% of all trucks have such mechanical problems.

Other reasons given as to why there are so many truck crashes are “any number of causes from driver error to fatigue and serious mechanical problems.”

As Graves’ letter to MSNBC points out however, about 70% of fatal truck-related crashes are actually not caused by the trucker. And though this point was brought up briefly in the segment, it was quickly followed by a statement from John Lannen, head of the Truck Safety Coalition, who placed the blame immediately back on drivers saying “unfortunately, there’s a cultural aspect that this industry has a tolerance – too high a tolerance level – for deaths and injuries.”

The segment discusses several other statistics in the first installment of the report that the ATA called “outrageously inaccurate.” You can also see further criticisms from the ATA, OOIDA, and other industry forces.

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Source: overdrive, ttnews, ccjdigital

Image Source: cnbc