How Dashcam and Telematics Data Are Changing Truck Accident Claims in Texas

Dashcams and vehicle telematics systems were originally marketed as fleet efficiency tools. Carriers used them to monitor fuel consumption, track driver behavior, and optimize routes. The legal applications were secondary. Dashcam video and telematics logs are now one of the most important pieces of evidence in commercial truck accidents, and the data goes both ways.

The Texas Department of Transportation reported 39,393 commercial vehicle crashes in Texas for 2024. Harris County’s 16 percent share of the state’s total commercial vehicle accidents was far greater than any other county.

All of those crashes resulted in digital data. The hours and days following the accident will influence the legal case’s path, depending on what happens to that information.

What a Commercial Truck Dashcam Records

Commercial truck dashcams do not forward facing lenses. For example, enterprise dashcam solutions from providers such as Samsara, Lytx, and Netradyne capture multiple cameras simultaneously to capture conditions on the road ahead, the driver in the cabin, and, in some cases, conditions next to and behind the trailer.

The camera in the driver-facing direction is used to detect eye movements that may indicate drowsiness or distraction, head position, and if the driver is using a handheld device. The systems automatically flag events with AI-assisted analysis and pass clips to fleet managers in real-time. The clips are kept for 30-60 days unless marked for incident review, where they can be kept longer.

Once an attorney is hired to deal with the claim, a spoliation letter is sent to the carrier within 24-48 hours of the crash. That letter doesn’t simply ask for the crash footage to be saved from the 24 hours prior to the accident. The pre-crash video is more beneficial to them than the impact video if it includes the driver yawning multiple times, changing positions, or looking at a device.

Commercial carriers have record retention policies, and data stored electronically may be overwritten or deleted as part of normal business practice if records are not kept for long enough. Attorneys handling truck accident litigation often act quickly to preserve this information before it is lost. If electronic records are important to proving liability, early evidence preservation is a standard practice at Sutliff & Stout in the investigation of serious claims of truck accidents.

How Telematics Data Changes the Liability Calculation

Telematics systems offer a log of the vehicle’s actions,s which cannot be manipulated after the fact. GPS tracks the exact path taken, departure time, stops made, de and average speed for each phase of the trip. Discrete events such as hard brakes, rapid accelerations, and sharp cornering are all recorded in the telematics log with time and location data.

Telematics data can offer objective truth about the driver’s actions in the 30 minutes prior to the crash, whether they claim to have been traveling at the speed limit with the lights on and brakes on. When speed data from the telematics log is compared to the speed from the event data recorder, it provides a confirmatory or contradictory image that impacts the driver’s credibility.

In addition, telematics data helps to create carrier-level liability. If the system indicates that the driver had a number of events with hard braking and speeding alerts in the days prior to the accident, and the driver’s dispatch team received those alerts but did not take any action, then it reflects that the management was aware of the driver’s unsafe driving and did nothing.

What Happens When the Carrier Deletes the Data

Under federal regulations, Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations, the records from electronic logging devices must be kept for six months. Unlike federal regulations, there is no equivalent mandate for dashcam or telematics reports, although some state courts have concluded the preservation of evidence obligation begins when a potential for litigation is reasonably foreseeable, generally starting at the time of a serious crash.

A spoliation violation can result from a carrier’s policy that would allow the dashcam to override the standard retention policy after a serious crash. A spoliation violation may occur if a carrier’s retention policy allows the dashcam to override the standard retention policy following a serious crash. If in a Texas court a party is responsible for preserving evidence and they destroy it, the court can provide the jury with an adverse inference instruction. That instruction tells the jury that it can presume that the lost evidence contained information that was unfavorable to the party who destroyed the information.

Carriers know this. Sophisticated carriers will also examine their own dashcam videos before an attorney asks to see them and will decide what footage to keep and what footage to allow to be overwritten. That unilateral selection process is prevented by an attorney who acts within 48 hours of the crash. An attorney who acts within 48 hours of the crash prevents that selection process from occurring unilaterally. Based on their experience handling commercial truck accident cases, attorneys at Sutliff & Stout treat early evidence preservation as one of the first steps in building a claim, which helps them win their cases. Understands that electronic records can have short storage lives and may not be accessible if action is delayed.

Dashcam Evidence in Crashes Where Fault Is Disputed

Disputed-fault crashes are the crashes where dashcam evidence has the greatest impact on case results. Two drivers reporting a crash at a highway merge where one car violates the other’s lane, but they both give conflicting stories that can be conclusively cleared up by a dashcam recording the position of each car with a time stamp.

Mergers with cars and CVCs are frequent in the intricate system of highways that crosses Houston, where I-10, I-45, I-69,-69 and I-610 intersect in close proximity. The complete video of all the lane changes and the passenger car’s location, from the forward-facing dashcam on the truck, eliminates the credibility issue from the case.

The insurance companies of trucking companies understand that their own dashcam footage can be used against them, and that’s why they have a rapid response team that works on evidence review after a collision. If the driver is injured and calls a truck accident attorney Houston before calling the carrier’s insurance representative, the injured driver will have someone on his or her side of the evidence race.