One Crash From Broke: America’s Truckers Are Driving on 1980 Insurance
If you bought it, a truck brought it. More than three million drivers move over 70 percent of everything this country consumes, measured by weight; they do it at night, in weather the rest of us stay home to avoid, on schedules set by people who sleep in beds. What almost nobody tells those drivers, because nobody is required to, is how little stands between a working trucker and financial ruin.
It is rarely the driving that ruins them. It is the paperwork: a liability limit written when Jimmy Carter was president, a cargo rule that sounds like protection and is not, and contracts drafted by everyone except the person behind the wheel.
“America runs on trucks,” says Scott Charnas, the New York attorney and founder of Charnas Law Firm, P.C. “But our laws treat the driver as the deepest pocket in the room and the last person anyone thinks to protect. That has to change, and it starts with truckers knowing what their rights actually are.”
A Number Older Than the Trucks
Federal law requires an interstate truck of 10,001 pounds or more to carry at least $750,000 in liability coverage. Congress chose that figure in 1980, and it has never been raised; not once, not for inflation, not for medical costs, not for eight-figure verdicts. In 1980, that was real money. Today it can be exhausted before a seriously injured victim’s first surgery is even scheduled, and everyone in the chain knows it except the driver counting on it.
Washington may finally be catching up. A bill now in the House, the Fair Compensation for Truck Crash Victims Act, would lift the minimum to $5 million and index it to inflation. New Jersey has already doubled the floor to $1.5 million for its largest trucks. Meanwhile drivers pay more than ever for the privilege of being underinsured: federal data put trucking insurance premiums at all-time highs, roughly 10.6 cents a mile and climbing, even as crash rates have fallen. Record prices, for coverage priced off a 1980 ruler.
“That number is older than some of the trucks’ dispatchers,” Charnas says. “Here is the part nobody says out loud: the minimum was never meant to make a driver whole; it was meant to keep the freight moving. There is a difference, and truckers pay it.”
The Truck Is One Liability. The Freight Is Another.
Ask drivers what keeps them up at night and most picture the wreck. Fewer picture the load. Every run carries two exposures: liability for the harm the rig can cause, and liability for the cargo behind the cab. The second is where the law quietly sets its trap.
Under a federal law called the Carmack Amendment, a carrier is strictly liable for the loss of the freight it hauls. The shipper need only show the goods were handed over in good condition and arrived damaged, or never arrived at all; the carrier’s defenses fit on one hand, and it must also prove it was not negligent. Here is the shock: with narrow exceptions for household goods movers, federal law does not require cargo insurance at all. No minimum, no filing, nothing. A driver can be fully legal, fully liable for a six-figure load of electronics or pharmaceuticals, and insured for none of it.
The market fills the gap with fine print. Brokers demand cargo certificates by contract, and the policies carry exclusions for unattended vehicles, unsecured lots and categories of freight, while cargo theft is surging; theft incidents are up some 70 percent in recent years, led by California, Texas and Illinois. When a load disappears and an exclusion swallows the claim, the liability does not disappear with it. It stays with the carrier, down to a one-truck operation with a mortgage.
“Ask a hundred drivers and ninety will tell you the government makes them carry cargo insurance,” Charnas says. “It does not. The government makes them liable for every dollar on the trailer. Full liability, no policy required; it is the worst combination in American law, and it lands on the smallest business in the chain.”
Insurance That Pays, Then Sends You the Bill
Even the coverage a driver does have may not work the way he thinks. Every interstate carrier’s policy carries an endorsement known as the MCS-90, meant to guarantee crash victims get paid. If a loss falls outside the policy, the insurer can be required to pay, then recover every dollar from the carrier. The driver believes he bought protection. In the worst case, he has co-signed a loan he never agreed to take.
The gaps multiply for independent drivers. Non-trucking liability covers the rig only when it is not working; occupational accident policies sold to owner-operators pay a fraction of workers’ compensation; and contracts keep shifting risk downhill. A Supreme Court ruling this spring, Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, limited a shield brokers had used against negligent-hiring claims, giving brokers and shippers even more reason to push their exposure onto carriers through indemnity clauses most drivers sign unread. Most states void clauses that force a trucker to cover someone else’s negligence, but a right nobody knows about is a right nobody uses.
“Truckers get hurt in the fine print now,” Charnas says. “Not on the highway; at a desk, weeks before any wreck, when the exclusions and the indemnity clause slide past in a stack of documents nobody explained. Read the contract before you read the load board.”
Rights You Already Have. Use Them.
None of this requires an act of Congress. Union or non-union, company driver or independent, every trucker already holds rights that change outcomes, if asserted in time:
The right to a copy of every policy and filing that carries your name, including the cargo policy and its exclusions, before you haul, not after a loss.
The right to your own lawyer when the insurer’s lawyer is not yours; after a serious crash, interests diverge fast.
The right to the data. Logs, dashcam footage and telematics can clear you or convict you, and they vanish fast. After any incident, demand in writing that everything be preserved.
The right to say no. Federal law protects drivers who refuse to run unsafe equipment or break safety rules, and drivers who report being coerced into illegal hours.
The right to workers’ compensation if you are an employee, and to challenge a contractor label that strips those protections while you are controlled like an employee.
The right to refuse a statement, and to give one only with counsel when an investigator comes calling after a crash.
This is not about sympathy. It is about a workforce that delivers everything, absorbs risks designed by other people, and is the last to learn the rules of the industry. The freight will keep moving either way. The question is whether the men and women moving it will keep paying for a system written in 1980 and drafted against them.
“Truckers do not need our thanks at the rest stop,” Charnas says. “They need rules written in this century, contracts written in plain English and the same fair fight every other American business takes for granted. Until Washington gets there, the least anyone can do is make sure they know the rights they already have.”
About Charnas Law Firm, P.C.
Charnas Law Firm, P.C. has spent more than three decades representing injured people nationwide, recovering more than $50 million for clients in personal injury, medical malpractice, and other serious injury matters. The firm offers free consultations: 212-980-6800.
