A truck operated by Next Level Express Inc. slammed into an SUV parked on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike last December, killing two parents and their daughter on the way home from a family gathering. A second daughter survived.
In the decade before the crash, none of the company’s trucks or drivers had been subjected to a single roadside inspection.
It’s a pattern repeating hundreds of times a year.
A CBS News analysis of millions of federal records finds more than 2,000 people have been killed since 2019 in crashes involving trucking companies that held federal authority to operate but had no roadside inspection on record before the crash. That includes 621 deaths in 543 crashes since 2024.
Roadside inspections, carried out by federal and state officers, are the government’s main tool for catching dangerous trucks, drivers and companies before they crash.
But even as trucks log more miles than ever, CBS News found inspections have not kept pace. Inspections per mile driven have fallen about 20% since 2016.
The analysis also identified thousands of companies that have never been inspected — before or after a crash — while holding federal authority to operate coast to coast.
See the full investigation at https://www.cbsnews.com/projects/2026/truck-inspections-decline/.
