Rise in truck crashes, large payouts, expected to boost insurance renewal rates this year

This is the first of a two-part series that looks at commercial truck insurance and how carriers can influence their insurability and affect their rates. Read Part 2, “Leveraging technology to calculate insurance risk, improve the bottom line,” at this link.

Beware and prepare.

Tractor-trailer insurance rates saw an uptick this year, brought on by a rise in truck crashes and massive settlements and judgements.

The worst possible rate surge could come from Washington, D.C. where U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Penn., 8^th District, is sponsoring a bill (H.R. 3781) to raise the minimum liability coverage on semis from $750,000 to $4.5 million, a 500 percent jump that would put even more upward pressure on premiums.

Cartwright, an attorney with a history of suing trucking companies, has come under fire from watchdog group Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust for proposing a bill that they say will benefit his family’s law firm if signed into law.

While H.R. 3781 has not advanced since being introduced in July to the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, Cartwright’s efforts are emblematic of an increasingly aggressive legal community that’s eager to put trucking companies on trial and cash-in big time.

“The verdicts that are coming out — which we call in the industry, nuclear verdicts, the big ones — they are a derivative of the reptile area of attorneys,” said Tommy Ruke, founder of the Motor Carrier Insurance Education Foundation.