Aging Trucks Can Be Costly

by Wesley Hall

For tank transport carriers hauling petroleum products, chemicals, food-grade liquids, and other bulk commodities, the age of their truck equipment is a known risk, an open item on the balance sheet. But new data reveals a more troubling gap: tank fleet executives are watching their safety performance erode in real time, while tracking the wrong metrics to stop it.

A recent 2026 transportation industry benchmark survey that included heavy-duty truck fleets and tank carriers shows that 58.62 percent of organizations are operating Class-8 trucks model year 2019 or older. Nearly 41 percent of those fleets have between one and 25 aging units running in their network, while 31 percent are managing 26 to 50 older trucks on a daily basis. That is not a small problem buried at the edge of operations. For tank carriers, pre-2020 tractors are often matched to specialized trailers and dispatched every morning on time-sensitive bulk runs, accumulating miles and adding incremental risk with each passing quarter.

For more news on tractors, heavy-duty equipment, and replacement-cycle decisions, visit our Class 8 Truck coverage.

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When those same executives were asked whether aging equipment had impacted their fleet’s safety performance, 75 percent said yes — 41 percent said it had slightly impacted safety, 34 percent said moderately, and 10 percent said significantly. Only one-quarter of respondents reported no impact at all.

Read that again: Three out of four leaders have already seen safety performance degrade from older equipment. For tank transport operators, where a brake failure or tire blowout can mean a hazmat spill, a rollover, or a multi-vehicle incident, the problem is not theoretical. It is happening in active tank fleets today.

A Dangerous Blind Spot Between Operations and Finance

Here is where the data turns genuinely alarming. When asked which key performance indicators they track most closely, executives ranked fuel economy (79 percent) and maintenance cost per mile (72 percent) as their top two metrics. These are reasonable, important numbers to manage. But scroll down the list of key performance indicators (KPI), and you’ll find the safety score is nearly invisible: only 3.45 percent of organizations formally track it.

For additional reporting on maintenance planning, equipment condition, and lifecycle costs, review our Fleet Maintenance archive.

The implication is hard to overstate. The majority of tank carriers have acknowledged that older trucks are degrading their safety outcomes, yet fewer than one in 28 are measuring safety performance as a tracked business metric. Fuel economy and maintenance costs are being managed with precision while safety drifts, unmeasured, in the background.

This is not a failure of intent. Tank fleet leaders clearly understand that safety matters, and their customers and regulators demand it. The gap is structural: The financial and operational KPIs dominating fleet dashboards are not connecting to the safety outcomes those same organizations are already experiencing on the road.

What Compliance, Safety, Accountability Scores Are Already Telling Insurers

“A brake failure or tire blowout can mean a hazmat spill, a rollover, or a multi-vehicle incident.” A hazmat tanker trailer separated from its tractor on Interstate 5 south of Salem, Oregon. (born1945 / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

Every roadside inspection, every violation, every reportable crash feeds into a fleet’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) score, a public record that shippers, brokers and insurers consult routinely. Older equipment tends to generate more vehicle maintenance violations: brake defects, lighting failures, and tire issues. Each one raises your Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASIC) scores. Each BASIC score increase triggers greater inspection frequency, reduced shipper confidence, and, compounding the pain, higher insurance premiums.

For related reporting on Compliance, Safety, Accountability data and how safety scores affect motor carriers, browse our CSA coverage.

The commercial trucking insurance market is under severe pressure. According to the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), insurance premiums hit a record $0.102 per mile in 2024, following a 12.5-percent spike in 2023. Nuclear verdicts – jury awards exceeding $10 million — have increased by 235 percent since 2012, and insurers are now scrutinizing safety records, telematics data and compliance histories before issuing coverage. Fleets with poor CSA scores face higher premiums or loss of coverage altogether.

For more articles on rising insurance costs and fleet risk management, explore our Insurance Premiums coverage.““““““`

For a tank carrier running a large percentage of pre-2020 trucks, this is not an abstract future risk. It is a present-day cost being absorbed, often without a clear line of sight connecting aging tractors to the insurance line item on the profit and loss (P&L) statement. The regulatory landscape is about to make this gap significantly more expensive to ignore. By model year 2027, all new Class 7 and Class 8 trucks must be equipped with Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) systems, per National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) rule-making finalized in early 2025. The technology is projected to prevent roughly 19,000 crashes and save 155 lives annually.

For updates on federal motor carrier rules, inspections, and enforcement activity, visit our FMCSA news page.

Critically, regulators have confirmed that there will be no retrofit requirement, as older trucks already in service are not required to be upgraded. This may sound like relief, but it is actually a liability accelerant. As of the 2027 model year, every truck that rolls off the line will have AEB as a baseline standard. Tank carriers continuing to run 2019 and older tractors will be operating units that lack the safety architecture that the industry and the courts will increasingly treat as unfavorable.

In litigation, that delta matters. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are already arguing that fleets without modern safety technology demonstrated negligence. Once AEB becomes a federal standard on new vehicles, the argument that an organization with a transportation fleet knowingly continues operating older equipment without equivalent protection will become far more powerful in front of a jury.

The Operations-Finance Divide

The survey data provides one more insight worth close attention. When asked about strategic priorities for the next several years, 38 percent of tank fleet executives said increasing organizational capability to scale more efficiently was a top goal. Yet only 10 percent identified improving cross-departmental alignment as a priority. That asymmetry is significant. The safety-to-finance connection, the chain of causality that runs from equipment age to CSA scores to insurance premiums to total cost of ownership, requires operations and finance leaders to be working from the same data.

When safety is managed operationally but not financially tracked, the cost of poor safety performance accumulates invisibly until it surfaces as an unexpected insurance renewal, a regulatory intervention, or worse, a catastrophic incident involving hazardous cargo. Tank carriers that want to scale fleet capability efficiently cannot do that while carrying structural blind spots in their safety data. The two priorities are not in tension; they are the same problem.

Closing the Gap Before It Closes You

“Older equipment is not only a maintenance issue. It can become an insurance, compliance and safety issue.” A tanker truck parked along a roadside. (Tom Shamberger / Unsplash)

The data is clear. Older equipment is degrading safety performance. Safety performance is not being formally measured. Insurance markets are tightening. And a regulatory standard is arriving in 2027 that will redefine the baseline for what a safe, modern truck looks like. Executives do not lack urgency; they lack visibility. The first step is straightforward: add the safety score as a tracked KPI alongside fuel economy and maintenance cost per mile. Until tank carriers include this data in the same dashboard, the connection between aging tractors and safety outcomes will remain a known risk that nobody is formally managing.

The tank-transport carriers that begin quantifying the safety cost of older equipment and connecting it directly to insurance costs, CSA exposure, and lifecycle planning will be the ones best positioned to navigate what is shaping up to be one of the most consequential periods of regulatory and financial pressure the bulk liquid and tank transport industry has faced in a decade.