The Problem Isn’t Broker Liability. It’s What Everyone Can’t See.
Last week, a CBS News report named C.H. Robinson as a freight broker that had hired trucking companies with spotty safety records, including carriers with hallmarks of so-called “chameleon carriers.” These are operators that shed poor safety histories by reconstituting under a new name with the same trucks, owners, and similar risk profiles.
The story landed at a particularly sensitive moment. The U.S. Supreme Court is actively deliberating Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, a case that could reshape how liability is assigned when a broker-hired carrier is involved in a crash. Regardless of how SCOTUS rules, the court of public opinion has already reached a verdict: the freight brokerage industry has a safety problem, and brokers need to do more.
That framing is understandable, but it’s also incomplete.
The issue isn’t simply that brokers aren’t trying hard enough to vet carriers, although many undoubtedly fall short. It’s that the information available to anyone in the industry is fundamentally limited, and often arrives too late to be useful. Until both change, it’s difficult to see how additional pressure alone meaningfully improves outcomes on the road.
How the system works today
When a broker vets a carrier today, the primary inputs are well known. FMCSA's Safety Measurement System (SMS) scores carriers across seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs), including Vehicle Maintenance. Those scores are built from roadside inspection violations and crash reports collected over the past 24 months.
In practice, that means the system captures safety issues after a truck has already been stopped on the side of a highway. It is, by design, reactive. Visibility is also partial; roughly 22% of commercial vehicles inspected are taken out of service, highlighting how much risk is only identified once a vehicle is already on the road rather than earlier in its lifecycle.
More broadly, the signals brokers rely on are constrained by what gets measured. Even where additional data exists, it is rarely structured or accessible in a way that can inform real-time decisions.
The on-road consequences of that gap are well documented. According to FMCSA, brake failure is the leading vehicle-related cause of truck crashes, contributing to 1 in 3 large truck crashes. A study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that three-quarters of trucks involved in crashes in North Carolina had vehicle defects identified only during post-accident inspections, meaning the problems were there before the crash, just invisible to anyone who might have acted on them.
Just last month, a semi in Jacksonville, Florida rear-ended a school bus carrying about 30 kindergarteners on a field trip. The driver told police he saw the bus stopped at railroad tracks, tried to brake, and couldn't - his brakes weren't working. He swerved but couldn't avoid the collision. Four children were injured. Attorneys for the families say maintenance records and inspection history will be central to the case. The crash is still under investigation; whether the brakes failed that morning or had been quietly degrading for weeks, the answer almost certainly lives in records that weren't visible to anyone outside the company before impact.
Defective incentives
One of the deeper problems is that the existing system has historically done little to reward carriers who invest in doing things right.
Repair and maintenance is a huge cost for operators, even when they are phoning it in. A fleet that replaces brake components on schedule, keeps detailed service records, and avoids deferred maintenance can look and be treated indistinguishably from one that runs equipment until it fails inspection, at least on paper. Keeping in mind the cost and effort, it distorts incentives to do the right thing.
When safety-conscious behavior goes under-recognized, the incentive to cut corners isn’t just tolerated. In fact, it becomes rational. Changing that dynamic requires more than stricter enforcement. It requires better visibility. Carriers who consistently invest in maintenance should be able to demonstrate it, and those who don’t should be easier to identify before something goes wrong instead of waiting for a random inspection to fail 18 months down the line or during a roadside blitz. The good news is, we're moving towards this becoming the norm.
Where visibility breaks down
Discussions around chameleon carriers often focus on identity: ownership structures, DOT numbers, and regulatory continuity. Those are real and difficult problems.
But they also point to a broader gap. Much of the data that reflects how a fleet actually operates does not travel with it in any meaningful way.
Equipment doesn’t reset when a carrier reorganizes. The trucks themselves carry histories of use, wear, and maintenance decisions, but that history is rarely visible outside the organization managing it. More broadly, many of the most operationally relevant signals sit outside traditional regulatory systems altogether.
Maintenance practices are one of those signals. Not because they explain everything, but because they provide a continuous view into how a fleet manages its equipment between inspections; how issues are addressed, how quickly they are resolved, and how consistently preventive work is performed.
That information already exists. It lives in repair orders, work orders, and shop systems across thousands of fleets and independent repair facilities. It is detailed and operationally meaningful. It is also fragmented, unstructured, and largely invisible.
What future visibility will look like
If the goal is to improve safety outcomes, the path forward involves expanding the set of data available to decision makers, rather than focusing exclusively on who bears responsibility after something goes wrong.
For brokers and shippers, that means having access to a more complete picture of how carriers operate over time, not just whether they meet baseline regulatory requirements, but how they manage risk day to day.
For carriers, particularly smaller operators, it creates an opportunity to demonstrate the quality of their operations more directly. Today, fleets that invest heavily in maintenance and those that do the minimum required can appear similar on paper. Clearer visibility would allow that distinction to matter.
At an industry level, the opportunity is to move incrementally away from a model that primarily identifies risk after it has surfaced, toward one that incorporates more leading indicators of how that risk develops.
For brokers, this shift may be less a choice than an inevitability. As legal exposure grows and scrutiny from shippers intensifies, the standard for what constitutes adequate vetting will continue rise. Brokers who can demonstrate they looked beyond a DOT number, who can point to operational data, not just regulatory scores, will be better positioned both legally and competitively. The ones who can’t will face a harder question: not just what they knew, but what they could have known. This will reward carriers who spend the time and effort to do the right thing, giving them a clear edge over those that don't.
The big question
The liability debate will play out. Courts will rule, regulations may evolve, and the industry will adapt as it has before. But those outcomes don’t change the underlying challenge: the most relevant information about how fleets operate is often the least accessible to the people making safety-sensitive decisions.
The more useful question isn’t only who is responsible after an accident. It’s what information might have made that outcome less likely in the first place and how that information can be made visible, reliable, and usable before something goes wrong. We're moving towards a world where that will become the standard.
Axle Mobility is the system of execution for fleet repair and maintenance, so techs, fleet managers and fleet executives can focus on rolling trucks and making money, not mindless admin.