Semi-Truck Blowout Cases: The Hidden Spoliation Risk of AI Telematics

The evidence problem in a tire-blowout case does not wait for the pleadings. It starts while the tractor is being towed, while dispatch is still collecting driver statements, and while the carrier’s systems continue doing exactly what they were configured to do: record, tag, upload, score, compress, and overwrite.

In a semi-truck tire-blowout liability analysis, that timing matters more than the familiar description of tread separation, loss of control, and impact geometry. The live question is whether the carrier still has the AI dashcam clip, the tire-pressure alert, the electronic control module event, and the predictive tire-health history when counsel finally asks for them. Transportation counsel have warned that AI dashcams and telematics systems can continuously record and tag events such as hard braking, lane departure, and distracted driving, while dashcam loops may overwrite within hours to days unless preserved; ECM data can cycle out within days absent a litigation hold.[1]

That is an uncomfortable collision between probative value and deletion speed. The most useful record may be the one with the shortest life.

The first legal fact is the overwrite clock

Truck-crash lawyers have long treated the early preservation letter as decisive. Fried Goldberg describes a familiar 78-hour window from accident to preservation letter in trucking litigation, and emphasizes that a spoliation letter can determine whether crucial evidence is preserved before normal business processes erase or alter it.[2] AI telematics make that window feel less generous. A letter sent inside three days can still arrive after a dashcam loop has cycled or after a cloud portal has stopped making an event clip readily retrievable.

The practical sequence is usually mundane. A crash happens. The driver reports a blowout. The carrier opens an internal file. The insurer is notified. A claimant’s lawyer sends a preservation demand. Someone in-house forwards it to operations or IT. Then everyone discovers that “we have telematics” did not mean “we know how long each record survives, who can export it, or whether deletion has been suspended.”

That discovery failure is not automatically bad faith. Routine overwrite is often a product setting, not a human decision made after a crash. But once litigation is reasonably foreseeable, the innocence of the original design does not solve the preservation problem. If the carrier relies on AI alerts for safety scoring, driver coaching, claims review, maintenance triage, or compliance documentation, it should already know which employee or vendor can stop those alerts from disappearing.

“The truck data” is not one thing

A blowout claim can turn on tire condition, maintenance history, inflation pressure, warning indicators, speed, steering response, braking, lane position, weather, load, and post-impact handling. The phrase “telematics data” flattens all of that into a single bucket. In discovery, the bucket has to be unpacked record by record.

The tire systems deserve special attention because they change the character of notice. A carrier used to defend a tire failure as sudden, latent, or undetectable. Predictive tire platforms complicate that story if they generated earlier warnings, pressure trends, or anomaly scores that no one exported before deletion or no one connected to the vehicle involved.

Revvo’s tire-data work is useful context, though not a substitute for case-specific proof. In a study described by the company, 21% of dual tire pairs operated with pressure imbalances exceeding 5 PSI, based on 146,000 tires over three years.[3] That finding does not prove negligence in any individual crash. It does show why pressure imbalance and tire-health history are no longer abstract maintenance topics; they may be stored as structured data before the incident occurs.

The compliance backdrop points in the same direction, with caution. Oxmaint’s DOT/FMCSA tire compliance guide states that tire-related factors are among the top 10 causes of fatal commercial truck crashes, and reports that the 2025 CVSA International Roadcheck identified 2,899 tire-related out-of-service violations, representing 21.4% of vehicle violations; the guide cites CVSA data, but the figure should be treated as a secondary citation unless verified against the original CVSA release.[4]

That is enough to make tire records worth preserving. It is not enough to make every tire event negligent. The distinction matters because litigation over a blowout is rarely about tire danger in the abstract. It is about whether this carrier had reason to know this tire, axle, wheel position, inspection process, or driver response created a preventable risk.

How routine deletion becomes Rule 37(e) exposure

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e) is not a punishment machine for every missing file. The narrower question is whether electronically stored information that should have been preserved in anticipation or conduct of litigation was lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps, whether it can be restored or replaced, and what prejudice or intent follows from that loss. In the trucking setting, the hard part is not reciting the rule. It is proving when the preservation duty attached and what the carrier could realistically control at that moment.

A serious blowout crash will often make litigation foreseeable before a complaint is filed. Fatalities, catastrophic injuries, police investigations, insurer involvement, roadside inspections, and direct preservation demands can all move a carrier from ordinary operations into preservation territory. Fried Goldberg’s discussion of spoliation letters in truck-crash cases is built around that leverage: the letter identifies the evidence to preserve and creates a record that the carrier had notice.[2]

From there, the analysis tightens.

• Was litigation reasonably foreseeable when the AI dashcam clip, ECM data, or tire-health record still existed?
• Was the information relevant to the disputed issues: tire condition, warning, maintenance, driver conduct, causation, or damages?
• Did the carrier control the record directly, or have a practical ability to obtain it from a vendor portal, fleet-management platform, maintenance system, or insurer?
• Could routine deletion have been suspended by a reasonable step, such as exporting clips, locking an event, imaging ECM data, opening a vendor ticket, or issuing an internal hold?
• Can the missing information be restored or replaced from another source, such as police photographs, inspection records, driver statements, repair invoices, or downloaded vehicle data?
• If not, did the loss prejudice the opposing party, and is there evidence of intent to deprive for the harshest sanctions?

That last narrowing is where many arguments either become credible or collapse. A carrier may have a defensible explanation for a clip that overwrote before any plausible notice of litigation. The same explanation is weaker after a preservation letter specifically requests dashcam footage, ECM downloads, tire-pressure records, maintenance alerts, and telematics data. Amundsen Davis warns that companies adopting AI and telematics face discovery risk because raw telematics and safety alerts may not tell the full story without context, yet those same records still have to be identified and preserved when relevant.[1]

The sanction risk is not academic. If a court permits an adverse inference, the jury may be allowed to conclude that the missing data would have been unfavorable to the carrier. In a tire-blowout case, that can change the value of the case because the missing evidence often sits exactly where the dispute sits: whether the blowout was sudden and unavoidable, or whether warning signs were generated and ignored.

The 78-hour letter can arrive after the shortest evidence has vanished

There is a cruel practicality here. The preservation letter is a lawyer’s tool. The overwrite setting is a software setting. They operate on different clocks.

A claimant’s lawyer may send a careful letter within the familiar early trucking window. It may demand the tractor, trailer, tires, ECM, dashcam footage, driver logs, maintenance files, tire-pressure data, telematics, dispatch messages, and inspection records. But if the carrier has not already mapped which systems overwrite in hours, which export only through a vendor ticket, and which users have permission to lock an event, the legal demand still has to travel through an organization that may not know where the evidence lives.

That is why procurement language matters. If a carrier bought AI dashcams to detect risky driving and bought predictive tire systems to improve maintenance visibility, it has already admitted that these systems matter operationally. It is harder, after a serious crash, to claim surprise that the same systems matter evidentially.

AI dashcam evidence cuts both ways

Dashcam footage is not plaintiff evidence or defense evidence by nature. It is scene evidence. Martin & Jones notes that AI dashcam evidence in truck-accident litigation can be used both for and against a carrier.[5] In a blowout case, the clip may show that the driver was within the lane, was not distracted, and reacted reasonably after a sudden tire failure. It may also show a dashboard warning, repeated vibration, unsafe following distance, late braking, or a driver looking away as the vehicle drifted.

That dual use is one reason preservation discipline should not be treated as a plaintiff-side issue. A missing clip may deprive the injured party of proof, but it may also deprive the carrier of the cleanest exculpatory record it had. The fleet manager who says the video would have cleared the driver is in a difficult position if no one saved it.

Vendor performance claims should be handled with the same restraint. Revvo describes customer claims of up to 90% fewer tire-related roadside events, but that is a self-reported customer claim rather than an independent litigation finding.[3] It may help explain why fleets buy predictive tire systems. It does not prove the system was accurate, properly monitored, or legally sufficient in a particular crash.

The preservation protocol has to be built before the crash file opens

A carrier does not need a perfect forensic lab to reduce spoliation risk. It needs a preservation map that matches the systems it chose to deploy. The map should exist before a tire failure because the first hours after a severe crash are usually consumed by medical response, scene management, equipment recovery, insurance notice, and driver support.

The vendor piece cannot be left vague. If the tire platform, dashcam provider, or fleet-management vendor hosts the data, the carrier still needs to know whether it can export data itself, whether the vendor must lock it, how long support takes to respond, what metadata is preserved, and whether a litigation hold can suspend automatic deletion. “Available in the portal” is not a custody plan.

Counsel’s first preservation demand should be equally specific. Asking for “all truck data” invites a narrow production and a later fight. A better demand identifies event video, surrounding loop footage, inward- and outward-facing cameras, ECM downloads, tire-pressure alerts, tire-health analytics, maintenance tickets, driver inspection reports, dashcam AI tags, telematics event summaries, vendor audit logs, and retention policies. The demand should also ask what systems existed on the tractor and trailer at the time of the crash, because the missing-system answer is often as important as the missing-file answer.

Preserved AI evidence still has to be proved

Preservation is only the first gate. A saved AI event clip or tire-health report can still face authentication, methodology, hearsay, expert, and context objections. California personal-injury commentators discussing 2026 AI and technology issues have pointed to a developing environment in which AI-generated accident reconstructions and telematics analysis may require disclosure of underlying methodology for admissibility.[6]

That is the right instinct. An AI tag saying “distraction,” “hard braking,” or “tire anomaly” is not self-explaining. The producing party should be able to show what sensor generated the data, what algorithm or rule classified it, whether the system was functioning, whether timestamps align across devices, who exported the file, whether the file was altered, and what surrounding context was omitted.

The same broader evidentiary problem appears outside trucking. Risk Digest’s The James Duckett case shows why AI evidence needs stronger gatekeeping is a useful parallel for courts confronting AI outputs without adequate foundation. For litigators building discovery plans, How to Challenge AI Evidence in ICE Detention Cases offers a transferable workflow: identify the system, obtain the inputs and outputs, test the claimed methodology, and preserve the chain of custody.

In a blowout case, that means the carrier’s preservation protocol and its admissibility protocol should meet. The person exporting the dashcam clip should know to preserve metadata. The person downloading tire records should know the date range, vehicle identifier, wheel position, alert definitions, and any vendor documentation needed to interpret the report. The lawyer receiving the files should not have to reverse-engineer the evidence chain months later from screenshots.

The compliance obligation follows the technology

AI telematics are not the problem. The problem is deploying them as safety infrastructure while leaving preservation to improvisation. A carrier that uses AI dashcams, ECM analytics, tire-pressure monitoring, or predictive maintenance tools has created a richer evidence environment. That environment can help explain a sudden tire failure. It can also prove prior notice, ignored alerts, poor maintenance triage, or unreasonable driver response.

The legal-risk architecture is straightforward: identify the data sources before the crash, know the overwrite clocks, assign preservation ownership, suspend routine deletion when litigation is foreseeable, export the records in usable form, and document the hold. If a fleet can configure a system to flag hard braking, lane departure, distraction, or tire-health anomalies for safety scoring, it can configure a process to preserve the same material when a blowout becomes a claim.

References

1. Discovery Risk With the Rise of AI and Telematics — Amundsen Davis, February 2026
2. A Spoliation Letter Can Make Or Break A Truck Crash Case — Fried Goldberg
3. The Blind Spot In Fleet Intelligence — Revvo Technologies
4. DOT / FMCSA Compliance for Tires Maintenance & Inspections — Oxmaint, January 2026
5. Evidence from AI Dashcams Could Be Used in a Truck Accident — Martin & Jones
6. How AI and Technology Are Changing California Personal Injury Claims in 2026 — California Accident Attorneys Blog, 2026