On I-10, 4 of 5 Fatal Truck Crashes Involve an Out-of-State Truck

The Finding

On Arizona’s Interstate 10, a truck registered outside the state turns up in nearly 4 of every 5 fatal large-truck crashes. I counted 185 of them from 2015 to 2024, and 147, or 79.5%, involved at least one truck that carried out-of-state plates.

Those 185 crashes killed 235 people. In the 147 crashes that involved an out-of-state-registered truck, 191 people died. I-10 is the freight spine that carries Los Angeles port traffic across southern Arizona to Phoenix and on toward Texas. The trucks that die on it are, four times out of five, registered somewhere else.

This is a registration finding, not a blame finding. It says where the trucks in these crashes are licensed, and nothing about who was at fault. What it shows is that Arizona’s busiest freight corridor runs largely on plates from other states.

How I Counted

The numbers come from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the federal census of every fatal crash on a US public road.

I pulled Arizona crashes from 2015 to 2024 that involved a large truck, meaning a vehicle FARS codes as a medium or heavy truck. Then I read the registration state recorded for each truck in the crash.

A truck counts as out-of-state when its registration record names a real US state other than Arizona. When the registration is unknown, not reported, or from Mexico, I didn’t count it as out-of-state.

That rule pushes every share here down, not up, so each figure is a conservative floor. The true out-of-state share is at least this high.

One caution matters most. Registration records where a truck is licensed, not who was driving it or where the trip started. This piece reports registration, not operation.

A California-plated truck may run for an Arizona company, and an Arizona-plated truck may be hauling a cross-country load. The finding is about plates, and it stays there.

I also drew the corridor tightly. The 185 crashes include a handful on I-10 ramps and frontage roads. If I count only the I-10 mainline and drop those 15, the corridor comes to 170 fatal large-truck crashes and 215 deaths. Either way, the out-of-state pattern is the story.

Out-of-State on the Interstates, Not the Back Roads

The pattern isn’t unique to I-10. Across all of Arizona’s interstates, out-of-state-registered trucks were involved in 79.6% of fatal large-truck crashes, 309 of 388.

Off the interstates, on state routes and city streets, that share fell to 32.2%, 216 of 670. A fatal truck crash on an Arizona interstate is far likelier to involve an out-of-state truck than one on any other road, about 2.5 times as often.

Statewide, across every road type, the out-of-state share settled at 49.6%, 525 of 1,058.

Source: NHTSA FARS 2015-2024. Out-of-state is a conservative floor. Computed by AZ Law Now.

Copy embed code Copied. Paste into your CMS. Free for editorial reuse. Embed includes a do-follow link to the source story.

The gap says something plain. Out-of-state trucks aren’t spread evenly across Arizona’s roads. They concentrate on the interstates, and I-10 is the busiest of them.

Where the Trucks Are From

There were 246 large trucks involved in those 185 fatal I-10 crashes, and 190 of them carried out-of-state plates. California led with 77, the single largest source of any state, Arizona included.

Indiana followed with 32 and Texas with 21, and the remaining 60 out-of-state trucks were registered across a spread of other states. Of the rest, 52 were registered in Arizona, and 4 couldn’t be tied to a state, their registration unknown, unreported, or foreign.

Source: NHTSA FARS 2015-2024. Out-of-state is a conservative floor. Computed by AZ Law Now.

Copy embed code Copied. Paste into your CMS. Free for editorial reuse. Embed includes a do-follow link to the source story.

The single biggest source of trucks in these crashes isn’t Arizona. It’s California, and it isn’t close.

The three leading states, California, Indiana, and Texas, cover 130 of the 246 trucks between them, but they don’t cover all of it. Out-of-state registration on I-10 is broad, not the work of a few places.

What This Means

A corridor where 4 of every 5 fatal truck crashes involve an out-of-state-registered truck has a safety record written largely by vehicles licensed somewhere else.

That’s a hard fact for a state to act on. Arizona sets its own road design and enforcement, but it doesn’t register most of the trucks dying on its busiest freight route.

It also shapes what happens after a crash. When an out-of-state truck is involved, the registration, ownership, and federal inspection records that matter to an injured family often sit in another state’s system, on federal databases, and behind an owner who may never have set foot in Arizona.

The paperwork that identifies the truck and its owner is exactly the paperwork that’s hardest to reach across state lines. Families and drivers hit by a commercial truck on I-10 can see how these cases work on our Arizona truck crash lawyer page.

None of this assigns fault. Registration doesn’t cause a crash, and an out-of-state plate doesn’t make a driver careless. What the data marks is a structural feature of Arizona’s busiest freight corridor: the trucks that die on I-10 mostly belong to the road, not the state.

On Arizona’s I-10, out-of-state plates are the rule, not the exception.

Related Coverage

For the legal and process context, see Ron DeBrigida’s guide to Arizona truck crash law and Stephanie Ramirez’s truck crash action plan.

For how the same corridor looks by county, see our investigation of Maricopa County truck crash deaths, where one county carries more than a third of the state’s total. And for how some trucking companies shed their safety records under new names, see ghost fleets and chameleon carriers on I-10.