The following description was taken from The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport: Has the Good News Masked the Real Heavy Vehicle Crash picture?
Over the last decade heavy vehicle fatal crashes for both rigid and articulated trucks have trended downwards. As well, the uptake of Performance Based Standards vehicles has grown significantly also adding to national safety outcomes. The continued uptake of the National Heavy Vehicle Accreditation Scheme, Trucksafe, ISO 39001 at the margin, and a renewed focus on CoR have been claimed to have added further improvements to our heavy vehicle safety outcomes.
Since 2012 three heavy vehicle truck accident reports have been commissioned that focussed on the behaviour of the Australian High Productivity Vehicles (HPVs) that become operational after being assessed and certified through the Performance Based Standards (PBS) processes. The time period spanned by these PBS Safety reports was from 2009 to 2019 inclusive. In each case the benefits in lower major crash rates for PBS vehicles ranged between 46% to 63%, a great outcome. However, this major crash analysis also compared the conventional heavy vehicle fleet safety performance to the ever-growing PBS fleet.