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Dispatch

‘Dangerous Trucks’ on America’s Roads

A conversation with A.C. Thompson about 'America's Dangerous Trucks,' underride crashes and how regulators failed to act for decades.

July 7, 2023

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Correspondent A.C. Thompson joins The FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss America’s Dangerous Trucks, an investigation in partnership with ProPublica.

The documentary examines a particularly devastating type of traffic accident involving trucks – underride crashes — and how for decades, federal regulators inside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) failed to enact new safety measures to prevent them.

“In the 1960s, the federal safety regulators, they start looking at this issue and they’re saying, this is a problem,” Thompson recounts. “They do studies, and it then takes them more than 30 years to do anything. And that was shocking to me.”

You can watch America’s Dangerous Trucks on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel and in the PBS App.

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