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They Told the Trucking Industry They Were Coming. One in Five Trucks Still Failed.

Automobile brakes
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Every May, inspectors across North America spend three days doing nothing but crawling over commercial trucks. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) calls it International Road check. It's the biggest coordinated commercial vehicle inspection effort anywhere, and CVSA publishes what it finds. Here's the part that should bother you. They announce the dates in advance. Months in advance. The trade press covers it, every carrier safety director knows it's coming, and fleets have every opportunity to get their equipment right before it starts.

In 2026 they ran 54,575 inspections and pulled 10,350 vehicles off the road — 19 percent. They pulled 3,184 drivers — 5.8 percent. That's the industry's performance with notice.

What "out of service" means

It isn't a ticket for a burned-out marker light. An out-of-service order means an inspector looked at a truck or a driver and found something serious enough that neither one moves until it's fixed.

Three years running:

2026

2025

2024

Total inspections

54,575

56,178

48,761

Vehicles out of service

10,350 (19%)

10,148 (18.1%)

9,345 (23%)

Drivers out of service

3,184 (5.8%)

3,342 (5.9%)

2,290 (4.8%)

Roughly one truck in five, every year, parked on the spot.

It's the brakes. It's always the brakes.

The single most common category of out-of-service vehicle violation, year after year, is braking.

The 2026 top five:

1. Brake systems — 3,379 (24.3%)

2. Tires — 2,914 (20.9%)

3. Twenty percent defective brakes — 2,072 (14.9%)

4. Cargo securement — 1,724 (12.4%)

5. Lights — 1,659 (11.9%)

Brakes take up two of those five slots. Add them and you get 5,451 violations or about 39 percent of everything found. CVSA stated the 2025 equivalent outright: 5,561 violations, 41.1 percent of all vehicle out-of-service violations. That third category deserves a translation. "Twenty percent defective brakes" means a fifth or more of the brakes on that vehicle weren't working. The truck was rolling on 80 percent of its designed stopping ability — a truck that, working perfectly, already needs up to two football fields to stop from 65 miles an hour.

The brake-specific numbers are no better

CVSA also runs campaigns that look at nothing but braking. Brake Safety Week, August 2025. Inspectors checked 15,175 vehicles across 52 jurisdictions and put 2,296 out of service — 15.1 percent. More than half the brake violations they wrote, 1,199 of them, were that same 20-percent-defective condition.

Brake Safety Day, April 2026 — this one unannounced. 4,021 vehicles, 574 out of service, 14.3 percent. Notice how close that is to the announced number. Whatever advance warning buys the industry, it isn't much.

There's one more figure from 2025 worth having. Fifteen states ran performance-based brake testing on 528 vehicles, which measures actual braking force instead of eyeballing the components. Twenty-five of them — 4.7 percent — couldn't hit the minimum 43.5 percent braking efficiency standard.

Whose job this is

Not the driver's. Or not only his. The regulation puts it on the company, and it doesn't hedge.

49 C.F.R. § 396.3(a):

"Every motor carrier and intermodal equipment provider must systematically inspect, repair, and maintain, or cause to be systematically inspected, repaired, and maintained, all motor vehicles and intermodal equipment subject to its control."

"Parts and accessories shall be in safe and proper operating condition at all times."

Section 396.3(b) then requires the carrier to keep records for every vehicle it controls 30 days or more — identifying the vehicle, showing "the nature and due date of the various inspection and maintenance operations to be performed," and keeping "a record of inspection, repairs, and maintenance indicating their date and nature."

Then there's the daily report, § 396.11. "Every motor carrier shall require its drivers to report, and every driver shall prepare a report in writing at the completion of each day's work on each vehicle operated." The list it has to cover runs through service brakes and trailer brake connections, the parking brake, steering, lights, tires, horn, wipers, mirrors, coupling devices, wheels and rims, emergency equipment.

And once a driver writes something down, the company's obligation kicks in. Before that truck moves again the carrier has to "repair any defect or deficiency listed on the driver vehicle inspection report which would be likely to affect the safety of operation of the vehicle," and has to certify on the report itself that it was fixed or that no repair was needed.

There's a sentence in that rule worth reading twice: "Drivers are not required to prepare a report if no defect or deficiency is discovered by or reported to the driver." So a file with nothing in it might mean the equipment was sound. It might also mean nobody was looking very hard.

Annual inspections come from § 396.17. A carrier "must not use a commercial motor vehicle... unless each component identified in appendix A to this part has passed an inspection... at least once during the preceding 12 months and documentation of such inspection is on the vehicle."

The part that has nothing to do with the merits

Maintenance cases turn on paper, and the paper has a short life.

Record

Rule

How long it has to be kept

Driver vehicle inspection reports

§ 396.11

3 months

Maintenance and repair records

§ 396.3(c)

1 year, plus 6 months after the vehicle leaves the carrier's control

Records of duty status and supporting documents

§ 395.8(k)(1)

6 months

Accident register

§ 390.15(b)

3 years

Three months on the daily inspection reports. That's the one document that would show whether a driver flagged a brake problem and whether anybody did anything about it. A carrier that shreds those on day 91 hasn't broken a single rule.

Mississippi doesn't recognize a standalone lawsuit for destroying evidence. In Dowdle Butane Gas Co. v. Moore, 831 So. 2d 1124 (Miss. 2002), the Supreme Court declined to create one, holding that "sufficient remedies exist for litigation-related misconduct such as spoliation of evidence" — mainly the spoliation inference, discovery sanctions under Rule 37, contempt, and bar discipline.

Those remedies are real. But they reach destruction that happened after somebody had a duty to preserve. Routine shredding inside a lawful retention window, before anyone asked, is a different animal — and it's why a written preservation demand has to go out in days rather than weeks.

What you can look up, and what you can't

FMCSA scores carriers in seven categories called BASICs: Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, Hours-of-Service Compliance, Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Hazardous Materials Compliance, and Driver Fitness.

Vehicle Maintenance is defined as "failure to properly maintain a CMV and prevent shifting loads, spilled cargo, and overloading." A general carrier that hits the 80th percentile there gets flagged for possible intervention.

You can look that score up. It's public.

You cannot look up the Crash Indicator. After the FAST Act of 2015, FMCSA pulled the Crash Indicator and Hazardous Materials BASICs from public view for property carriers. In the agency's words: "certain information previously available on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's (FMCSA) Safety Measurement System (SMS) Website related to property carrier's compliance and safety performance is no longer available for public display."

So a shipper picking a carrier, a broker tendering a load, or anybody else with an interest can see how the company maintains its trucks but not how often it wrecks them.

The gap

The rules on this are clear, they're mandatory, and they're written at the company rather than the driver. The enforcement data says roughly one truck in five fails badly enough to get parked, with brakes at the top of the list every single year, in an inspection everybody knew was coming.

And FMCSA ran about 12,329 carrier investigations in 2023 against 787,189 registered carriers.

The rules aren't the problem. Almost nobody's checking, and the records that would show what happened get thrown away in three months.

Sources

This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice, nor does it create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts. Statistics cited are drawn from the public sources listed and reflect the data years indicated; figures are updated periodically by the issuing agencies. If you have questions about a specific situation, consult a licensed attorney. Coxwell & Associates, PLLC, 500 North State Street, Jackson, Mississippi 39201. Free background information available upon request.

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