Common Causes of Car Accidents and Workplace Vehicle Injuries

Comprehending the causes of vehicle accidents is necessary to determine the offending party. If a person fails to exercise caution in his or her behaviors, it falls within the definition of negligence. It is possible that pinpointing the negligent act will clarify why certain accidents keep happening in the first place. This analysis also determines who should be held liable. In road accidents involving an employee while they are working, the employer may need to analyze the cause of these accidents to help fulfill regulatory duties and assess potential liability.

Let’s examine the common causes of car accidents and how they influence how a car accident case is handled.

Distracted Driving: The Leading Behavioral Cause

Distracted driving is anything that takes your focus away from actually driving. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration lays out distractions as visual, manual, and cognitive. Cell phone use combines all these elements all at once. The driver shifts their gaze from the road to the screen, loses the grip of the steering wheel, and their cognitive focus changes. Every 5 seconds a driver looks away from the road on high-speed roads is like driving the length of a full American football field without any sight or vision assistance.

Under federal laws, almost every commercial vehicle operator is prohibited from driving while using a hand-held cell phone. This prohibition is observed in almost all states. A driver texting at the time of an accident could be considered reckless and at fault for the incident. The penalties for this specific traffic infraction would differ according to where the violation occurred. In this particular situation, the act itself becomes the breach of the duty, rather than requiring more proof that the conduct was somehow unreasonable.

For workplace vehicle incidents, claims about distracted driving often happen when employees are using employer-provided devices while they’re driving during company time. Employers that require or even allow workers to reply to calls or messages while the vehicle is moving can share liability in case of an accident. There may also be OSHA concerns since there was a failure to keep the workplace reasonably safe.

Speed: The Multiplier of Severity

Speed is pretty consistently tied to contributing to about one third of traffic deaths. In a scenario where one vehicle is moving at 60 mph and the second is moving at 30 mph, the first vehicle will have more kinetic energy. The more velocity the vehicle has, the more injuries it will cause or damage in terms of property.

Speed-related liability is not just about going over the posted limit. For example, a driver going 45 mph in a 45 mph zone during a heavy rain would still be held for negligence since they should have slowed down their speed on account of the weather condition. The liability discussion regarding speed tends to revolve around what a reasonable person would do under the actual conditions of the road.

Impaired Driving: Legal Standards and Civil Liability

To drive under any alcoholic or drug influence is a punishable act, both in criminal and civil crime contexts. In every DUI statute and policy, intoxication is deemed having a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08% for the driver in the vehicle. Once there’s a crash caused by an impaired driver, liability can be supported by strong paperwork. Still, impairment that’s below the legal threshold can count as negligence if the driver’s real-world faculties were clearly diminished and that diminished condition helped cause the crash. Even when there’s no criminal charge, evidence of alcohol use, observed driving behavior, and accident reconstruction indicating driver error can be enough to back up a negligence claim.  

Dram shop liability extends liability exposure to businesses that serve alcohol to patrons who are visibly intoxicated and later cause accidents. Most places that have dram shop laws let injured third parties sue the establishment directly for damages tied to the impaired driver the business served. The exact requirements for dram shop liability differ between states.

Workplace Vehicle Accidents: A Separate Legal Framework

According to Rancho Mirage auto accident on-the-job lawyer Juan Manuel Armenta, it can be challenging to determine whether a person was “on the job” when an accident occurred. Once proven, workplace vehicle accidents operate within two overlapping legal frameworks: workers' compensation and civil liability. If an employee gets hurt while driving for work purposes, workers’ compensation kicks in and usually provides no-fault benefits. Under this system, medical treatment and lost wages are handled regardless of how the crash actually happened. In most cases, workers’ compensation also prevents the injured employee from suing their employer in tort. Still, a third-party tort claim against the driver who caused the accident is possible.

Employers can face extra exposure beyond workers’ compensation when their negligence plays a role. An employer who neglects to do background checks on a driver with a history of license suspensions or records of previous violations can end up with direct liability. When something goes wrong at work, OSHA may investigate serious workplace vehicle incidents and issue citations for violations of its vehicle safety standards. The regulatory trail can help support future civil claims.

Information on annual accidents and fatality reports also comes from reports made by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These materials describe how often crashes happen and the kinds of causes involved. They also give some statistical context for the common liability arguments that show up in motor vehicle accident litigation.

Weather Conditions and Fault Analysis

Adverse weather is what drivers usually cite as the reason for a crash. But it doesn’t get accepted as a full-stop defense very often. The weather is foreseeable, and drivers have a responsibility to tune their speed and overall driving habits to match what’s happening outside. If someone loses control on an icy road while they are going highway speeds, at a time when the road conditions clearly called for a slower pace, that person could not argue that the crash was brought about by the weather conditions.

In road accidents caused by adverse weather conditions, the focal point is what an ordinary person would have done under the same circumstances. Normal actions of most drivers driving through hostile weather conditions include reducing speed and maintaining a safe following distance from other moving vehicles. If a driver didn’t take those measures and still caused the wreck, then they can be held responsible for the incident.

Fatigue: An Underreported Cause With Significant Consequences

Fatigue-related driving impairment is hard to quantify. Crash data indicates that this cause of accident is underreported. Most people don’t really admit they were tired and there is no available tool to measure the fatigue levels of an individual. Studies on driving while impaired by lack of sleep state that 18 to 20 hours without sleep leads to impairment on par with a blood alcohol concentration of around 0.05 percent. Once you hit 24 hours of sleeplessness, the impairment lines up with about 0.10 percent, which is above the legal limit everywhere in the United States.

For commercial drivers, the federal hours-of-service rules put in place maximum driving time plus minimum rest period requirements, specifically to manage fatigue risk. A commercial carrier where the driver broke hours-of-service requirements before the crash can end up with major liability exposure. Regulatory violation implies the carrier knew or at least should have known the driver was operating in a fatigued state. In these cases, log book entries, electronic logging device information, and dispatch communications matter a lot. These pieces of evidence are often the key materials used to piece together commercial driver fatigue scenarios.