Significant liability insurance hike floated again in Congress ccjdigital.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ccjdigital.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Liability insurance minimum increase legislation reintroduced
A bill that would tie truck owners’ minimum liability insurance requirements to medical care inflation has been reintroduced in the U.S. House.
Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-Illinois) first introduced the legislation, dubbed the “Improving National Safety by Updating the Required Amount of Insurance Needed by Commercial Motor Vehicles per Event (INSURANCE) Act” in 2019, but it never advanced past the House Transportation Committee.
While the text of the reintroduced bill is not yet available, the original bill called for motor carriers’ minimum insurance levels to be raised from $750,000, based on medical-cost inflation.
According to the language of the 2019 bill, the amount of $750,000, which was set as the insurance minimum in 1980, would have had the same buying power as $4.9 million in 2019, based on medical-cost inflation.
Bill to tie insurance minimums to medical-cost inflation reintroduced overdriveonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from overdriveonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association filed comments warning federal transportation agencies that a lack of transparency not only violates their own mission statements but is also dangerous for all of the motoring public when it comes to efforts to integrate autonomous or Automated Driving Systems into trucking.
“The potential introduction of AVs on the nation’s highways invites more questions than answers. As autonomous technology develops, such as with companies like TuSimple, we are concerned that federal regulators will push for more technology as the solution to the industry’s safety and workforce issues without considering the negative impacts of these technologies,” said Todd Spencer, president of OOIDA.
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As the Biden administration attempts a hard turn toward electrifying transportation, small, independent owner-operators who represent the vast majority of trucks on the road fear that the cost of moving in that direction could put them out of business.
But commercial drivers participating in the U.S. Department of Energy s (DOE) Super Truck program geared toward reducing emissions are trying to convince them otherwise. Early on when we had emission-system truck rollouts, a lot of smaller fleets and owner-operators took it on the chin out in the field, Joel Morrow, a driver for Norwalk, Ohio-based Ploger Transportation, explained during a virtual presentation sponsored by DOE on Thursday announcing the start of SuperTruck 3.