Government estimates place the number of road accidents caused by driver fatigue at more than 50,000 annually. The government statistics show that driver fatigue kills at least 1,550 victims each year and causes approximately 71,000 injuries.
But those figures don’t reveal the true magnitude of the problem of driver fatigue on our roads. Driver fatigue remains under-reported as a cause of accidents. Police might choose to attribute a collision to a more directly observable cause than driver fatigue. And in road accidents where the driver behind the collision suffers fatal injuries, finding out whether fatigue caused him to lose control of his vehicle becomes difficult.
In a fatal Montgomery County collision between a pickup truck and a big rig, the pickup truck veered across several lanes of roadway before striking the 18-wheeler head on. The driver of the pickup truck suffered fatal injuries from the two-vehicle crash. The driver of the big rig survived uninjured. Investigators at the scene could not immediately find an obvious cause for the pickup driver’s loss of control of the vehicle.
A standard culprit in such wrecks, the cell phone, remained in the man’s pocket. So officials ordered an autopsy to determine whether medical causes or intoxication might be behind the sudden collision. Driver fatigue stands out as another factor that might have caused the wreck, which occurred in the wee hours of the morning around 1:15 a.m.
As Houston truck wreck lawyers, we need to mention another factor that often causes road crashes. This factor didn’t get mentioned in the news accounts of the incident, but it involves vehicle defects. Government web pages provide long lists of manufacturers’ vehicle recalls for defects that can cause all kinds of problems.
1. Sudden fires.
2. Explosions.
3. Loss of steering control.
4. Rollover accidents.
That short list provides just a few examples of the many manufacturing defects that can lead to serious injuries or fatalities in the vehicle accidents that result from the defects. So I hope that authorities investigating the Montgomery County crash take a good look at the pickup truck that crashed, just in case the wreck resulted from a product defect.