A close look at the Super Ego chameleon carrier network identified by CBS News revealed affiliations between some of the most shockingly unsafe carriers in trucking, with absolutely horrific safety scores placing them in the bottom 0.03% of all registered carriers.
The new analysis comes from two Fusable companies: Overdrive and the Central Analysis Bureau (CAB), the firm that coined and trademarked the term "chameleon carrier" more than a decade ago.
Using tailored technology to dig into fleets' ownership history, inspections and crashes, and creditors' UCC filings, CAB set about analyzing the network after assisting CBS News for its segment on 60 Minutes detailing allegations of driver wage theft, unsafe practices, compliance evasion and ELD cheating.
While the chameleon label simply refers to carriers with hidden association to other entities or that share a large number of truck VINs in common, CAB told 60 Minutes such carriers are four times as likely to get into a crash.
When CAB dug into a list of 26 DOT numbers the news network had ID'd as connected to Super Ego, sent by CBS in late February, another pattern emerged.
Looking at the CSA Safety Category percentile rankings for the carriers listed, many scored among the very worst out of hundreds of thousands registered carriers.
"These are some of the worst scores I've seen," said Fusable Chief Product Officer Shuie Yankelewitz.
CAB mostly rates carriers for insurers, and he noted that many of the carriers had multiple insurance terms that did not complete.
"Some insurers won't accept a motor carrier that has more than two scores in Alert," he explained, meaning two category scores higher than the level at which the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration prioritizes them for intervention/audit. Most insurers "will look very closely when a carrier has three in Alert."
[Related: C.H. Robinson, Super Ego chalk up 'chameleon carrier' outrage to a big misunderstanding]
Out of 26 companies with DOT numbers that CBS provided, 13 were still active, and a total of 11 had three or more scores in Alert status.
Eight showed a whopping five categories with scores above the federal intervention threshold (one of those carriers was no longer active).
Yankelewitz, who has reviewed thousands of carrier profiles, was floored by the concentration of terrible scores, roughly 30% of the CBS-ID'd fleets with five category scores in Alert.
"That is a staggering statistic," he said. "For context, only 135 carriers out of roughly 575,000 [registered and with data in the federal system] have 5 categories in Alert status." That's well less than a tenth of a percent, as noted up top.
Trytime Transport LLC, linked to the Super Ego network by CBS reporting and CAB data, has incredibly poor safety scores. Four categories are in Alert status based on data still in the federal system (the fleet's authority was revoked in early March): Unsafe Driving, Hours of Service, Vehicle Maintenance, and the Crash Indicator all tower into the 90th percentile and above. This carrier last reported 200 drivers and 200 power units. Overdrive efforts to contact Trytime were unsuccessful as of this report, with messages unreturned.CAB Report
Most of the active carriers on CBS's list claimed to be big fleets. Those with still-active DOT numbers, several recently shut down but still showing data in the federal system's two-year lookback, claimed a combined 1,569 power units in the Safer database, according to Overdrive's accounting.
The average count was 165 drivers and a similar number of trucks. Fleets on the list ranged from 25 to 252 power units.
Together those companies were party to a combined nine fatal crashes, 87 crashes producing injuries and 151 requiring a vehicle tow, all DOT recordable, within the last two years.
The rate of crash involvement for these fleets combined thus is a staggering 157 crashes per 1,000 reported power units over those two years.
When Overdrive last analyzed the same data industry-wide, the average figure for the four-year period following implementation of the ELD mandate was roughly 20 crashes per 1,000 reported power units, annually.
This network's crash rate is roughly four times that.
[Related: ELDs and highway safety: Crashes, injuries and fatalities rise post-mandate]
