Revolutionary Safety Innovations (RSI) Making Highways Safer Through Innovation

    EVERY 16 MINUTES OF EVERY DAY. . .
    . . .    A    nother person in the United States will be injured or killed in a truck related accident.

    • Over 450,000 large trucks were involved in crashes last year
    • Over 1,000,000 people were involved in the crashes
    • Over 5000 people were killed
    • Over 140,000 people were injured
    • One third of the injured suffered catastrophic damage

    The Problem:
            Wheel bearings fail for a number of various reasons.  When the wheel bearings have a catastrophic failure, the retaining fasteners that hold the wheel assembly on the spindle, will begin to loosen and will eventually fail as the wheel assembly "wobbles".  This combination of mechanical failures result in the wheel assembly to be separated from the vehicle.  This type of accident happens 1000's of times each year.  Many times lost wheel assemblies cause serious accidents resulting in injury or even the death.

    The Statistics for Wheel Loss or Wheel Separation:
    2002 NTSB Data

      The accidents, occurring in close succession, triggered a special investigation by NTSB. Among the conclusions published in this special investigation:

      • National Transportation Safety Board prepared a special investigation into medium/heavy truck wheel separations. They reported that wheel separation accidents constituted about 0.3 percent of all truck accidents.
  • The incidence of medium/heavy truck-wheel separation accidents is about 750 to 1,050 per year, compared to the total number of truck accidents, about 349,000 annually
  • The leading causes of wheel separations from medium/heavy trucks are improper tightening of wheel fasteners and bearing failure; both are the result of inadequate maintenance
  • Under-tightening of wheel fasteners usually results from the failure to follow recommended wheel maintenance practices, such as always using a torque wrench, following proper tightening procedures, using only compatible components, and avoiding aint build-up, debris, oil, or rust between wheel fasteners, threads, and mating surfaces
  • Over-tightening can more easily result from using an air impact wrench instead of a torque wrench
  • The trucking industry lacks uniform model guidelines for maintenance and inspection of all types of medium/heavy truck wheels
    • This data is consistent with other more comprehensivestudies that show wheel failures resulted in 1% of all trucking accidents

    2006 LTCCS Study & Data

    This data released in March 2006, FMCSA submitted a report to Congress detailing the study's principle findings are from a 2006 study titled “The Large Truck Crash Causation Study” (LTCCS) and was conducted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the DOT

    • In this report (found at http://www.ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/LTCCS/)
    • Refer to page 14 of the file titled LTCCS_DATA_Summary_Tables.pdf
      • It shows that Tires/Wheels failed resulting in 1% of crashes
      • Brakes Failed resulting in 1% of crashes
        • In conclusion:  Data analysis is difficult since most major studies fail to distinguish between wheel separation, tire failure accidents or lug nut failures.  As such .3% is commonly adopted for “wheel separation” as the cause.  The database used to determine the frequency of wheel separation accident was somewhat unreliable due to a lack of standardized reporting procedures within the transportation industry
        • This large comprehensive study is consistent with NTSB findings
        • .3% should be assigned to “Wheel Separation/Loss” as the cause of “REPORTED” truck crashes in the United States
        • 2006 Truck Crash Statistics http://ai.volpe.dot.gov/CrashProfile/CrashProfileMainNew.asp
          • 2006 Large trucks and buses were involved in 342,425 crashes in the United States
          • If .3% of these were caused by wheel separation or wheel loss that would total 1,027 “REPORTED” accidents resulted from this cause alone
          • This is consistent with NTSB Data collected over the late 80’s to early 1992 and again in 2002.  The NTSB estimated that there are between 750 and 1,050 wheel separations annually from large trucks, with an injury rate of 26%
        • Evidence suggest that the condition has not improved much over the last 20 years
        • 2004 statistics show truck crash rate to be 1.96 crashes per 100 million truck miles

      Confirmation:  In the early 1990’s, a U.S. organization called the National Transportation Safety Board prepared a special investigation into medium/heavy truck wheel separations. They reported that wheel separation accidents constituted about 0.3 percent of all truck accidents

      Additional Information:

      • Recent reported in Ontario Canada:
        • There have been nearly 90 reported incidents of flying truck wheels in Ontario in the past 14.5 months – more than half of them this year, reports a recent Toronto Star article
        • Such a high rate of incidence has prompted many agencies to crack down on truck drivers
        • Despite all the recent media attention the problem of wheel separations is not new

         

  • From January 1989 to December 1991, fatal accidentsresulting from wheel separations totaled 24, compared to 12,300 medium/heavy truck fatal accidents for the same period
  • Four fundamental causes of wheel separations were presented in the report:
    • Loose and over-tightened fasteners
    • Bearing failures
    • Disc failures
    • The causes presented were mainly attributed to improper maintenance and overloading

     

     

Revolutionary Safety Innovations ©2007