Qualified drivers are hard to replace, and a single bad crash can now cost more than a fleet's entire insurance tower. The response at carriers like Dot Foods is to score every driver, coach the riskiest ones hard, and pay for safe miles instead of hiring their way out of trouble.
Key Takeaways
For most of trucking's history, the answer to a risky driver was simple: let them go and hire another one. That answer is getting expensive. Experienced drivers are scarce and getting pricier, jury awards against carriers keep climbing, and a Supreme Court decision this spring has made the safety record of every truck on a load a legal question for the broker and shipper that chose it. The fleets adapting fastest have stopped treating safety as a hiring filter and started treating it as a skill they can measure and build.
The clearest recent example comes from Dot Foods, the food industry redistributor. Speaking at a private fleet conference, senior director of safety Tim Eckhardt described to FreightWaves how the company's safety operation has moved from reactive to data driven. Dot runs nearly 2,200 trucks and about 2,900 multi-temperature trailers across the U.S. and Canada, and its program is built around a driver score that runs from zero, the best, to 100. Any driver scoring above 70 is put on a professional development plan that can include coaching, retraining and ride-alongs. The week before the conference, only about 30 drivers were above that threshold.
The score is fed by in-cab cameras, telematics and predictive analytics, with particular attention on distraction and speeding, and Dot uses electronic speed governors to address specific behaviors. The effort concentrates on the bottom 10% to 20% of the driver population, where the risk actually lives. Eckhardt described the old way as digging through systems and spreadsheets to piece together what had happened after the fact. Now the data points managers at the drivers who need help before a crash rather than after one.
Two structural choices make it work. First, Dot keeps roughly 200 over-the-road driver trainers, aiming for about 12 drivers per trainer, and holds manager-to-driver ratios near 70 to 80 so that coaching is a relationship rather than a form letter. Second, it pays for results: the quarterly safety bonus has grown to nearly 10% of driver income. Eckhardt credited transparency and open books with making drivers trust the scores, and stressed that the point is not to build a plan and coach endlessly but to find the technology and interventions that actually change behavior.
The labor side of the equation has shifted quickly. In the Cass September freight roundup, Anderson Trucking Service announced a 16.7% driver pay increase, from 60 to 70 cents a mile, while McElroy Truck Lines highlighted that 85% of its drivers are home by 5 p.m. on Friday. When carriers are competing on pay and home time to fill seats, every driver who washes out after a preventable incident takes recruiting, onboarding and training cost with them. Keeping an experienced driver and fixing one habit is usually cheaper than starting over.
The liability side has moved even further. NationaLease senior vice president Jane Clark, writing in FleetOwner, noted that roughly one in four auto accident trials that end in verdicts above $10 million involve commercial trucking carriers, and that the federal minimum liability requirement remains $750,000, a figure unchanged since 1985. Against a $51 million verdict she cited, that minimum covers less than 1.5% of the award. Insurers price that exposure into premiums, which is why the fleets that can prove their safety program works are the ones still getting affordable coverage.
The industry's own priorities reflect the pressure. In the 2025 edition of ATRI's Top Industry Issues survey, lawsuit abuse reform ranked second and insurance cost and availability third, behind only the economy, according to Heavy Duty Trucking. The 2026 survey closes October 2, and results will be released October 18 at ATA's Management Conference and Exhibition in Charlotte.
When a single verdict can run to tens of millions of dollars and the federal minimum is $750,000, the cheapest safety intervention is the one that keeps a known driver from having the crash in the first place. Logistics Focus analysis
Until this year, brokers could often get negligent selection claims dismissed early by arguing federal law preempted them. That changed on May 14, when the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that such claims fall within the safety exception of the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act. The case involved a carrier with only a conditional FMCSA safety rating, hired through C.H. Robinson. As transportation law firm Cottingham & Butler summarized, brokers now need documented vetting processes built on current FMCSA data, carriers with weaker safety profiles face more selective hiring, and shippers should revisit indemnification, insurance and contingent auto coverage in their transportation contracts.
That turns a carrier's internal coaching program into a commercial asset. A fleet that can show falling risk scores, documented interventions and improving CSA results is easier for a broker to defend choosing and easier for a shipper to keep on a lane. A fleet that cannot will find the market narrowing, regardless of its rate. For logistics leaders on the shipper side, the question is no longer only what a carrier charges, but what evidence it can produce about how its drivers are managed. The firm's own advice is that brokers who exercise reasonable care and document their decisions remain well positioned to defend claims.
The economics of trucking safety have quietly flipped. Replacing a risky driver used to be the cheap option and coaching the expensive one. With drivers costing more to recruit, verdicts running far past any realistic insurance limit, and legal exposure now reaching the brokers and shippers who choose carriers, the fleets that can measure risk and change behavior are building an advantage that shows up in insurance quotes, contract awards and retention alike. The rest are one bad crash from finding out what their safety program was really worth.
Guide
Dot Foods credits transparency and open books for getting drivers to trust their scores. IntelliShift explains how fleets move past rules and monitoring to a culture where drivers, dispatchers and managers share responsibility for risk.
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Guide
Coaching the riskiest 10% to 20% of drivers only works if the coaching changes behavior. Lytx lays out specific interventions for programs that have plateaued, from more effective coaching to stronger driver engagement.
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Report
After Montgomery, a carrier's crash can land on the broker and shipper that chose it, a tail risk few transportation contracts priced in. GEP examines the blind spots supply chain leaders underestimate and how resilient organizations prepare for them.
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