Trucks vs. humans: Big rigs need automatic emergency braking to make them safer on the roads

As your high school physics teacher told you over and over again, Newton’s Second Law of Motion says that force equals mass times acceleration. That’s why, when a car runs into something at a high speed, the wreckage is by definition enough to maim or kill. The truism is even truer when the vehicle is a truck, especially heavy masses of steel that are typically less maneuverable, have larger blind spots and can’t come to a stop nearly as quickly, no matter how alert the driver may be.

This helps explain why, in the age of e-commerce, with ever more trucks on the road, the nation suffered a 71% increase in fatalities involving trucks and other very heavy vehicles between 2009 and 2021. Overall automobile crash deaths rose 27% over the same period.

While there’s no simple way to cram the genies back in the bottles, there is a smart path to ensuring that the genies kill fewer people: require automatic emergency braking on all new heavy-duty trucks (meaning those exceeding 26,000 pounds), as the National Highway Safety Administration is preparing to do to satisfy a law passed by Congress. Still better, regulators should widen the mandate to include medium-duty vehicles (10,000 pounds and up), many of which are driven by people without special licenses. Indeed, we’d be all for requiring old trucks to be retrofitted with state-of-the-art technology.

We have no idea when self-driving cars and trucks will become commonplace on U.S. roads and highways, but ordinary cars with human drivers behind their wheels are already broadly benefiting from the rollout of sophisticated crash-avoidance technology. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety finds that cars with the newfangled features are much less likely to get in crashes. A 2020 study by the IIHS says that putting forward-collision warning and automatic emergency braking on large trucks could eliminate two out of every five rear-end crashes.

Trucking-industry advocates, like kids throwing rocks at passing cars, say the advances cost too much. The victims of thousands of truck crashes would violently disagree.