Automatic Emergency Braking Could Have Prevented The Crash. Was It Even Installed?

Many newer commercial trucks come equipped with collision mitigation technology, systems that use radar or cameras to detect a slowing vehicle ahead and apply the brakes automatically if the driver does not react in time. What most people do not realize is that none of this is federally required. Whether a truck has it, whether it is functioning, and whether it was actually used often depends entirely on the carrier.

Questions that tend to matter in these cases include:

• Equipment Status: Whether the truck involved was equipped with forward collision warning or automatic braking at all, given that adoption still varies widely across the industry.
• System Disablement: Whether a functioning system had been manually disabled, either by the driver or through a fleet setting, before the crash occurred.
• Sensor Obstruction: Whether dirt, damage, or improper mounting had degraded the system's ability to detect a hazard.
• Alert Response Patterns: Whether the system issued a warning that data shows the driver did not act on in time.

When a carrier chooses not to equip its fleet with available safety technology, or fails to maintain the technology it does have, that decision becomes part of the story once a preventable rear-end crash happens. Our legal team looks at fleet specifications and maintenance records because they often show whether the crash was a genuine surprise or a foreseeable gap in available safety equipment.

Did you know automatic braking isn't required on commercial trucks yet? Does that surprise you?