You can get operating authority for $300.
Three hundred bucks, some paperwork, and you’re officially a motor carrier. But insurance, that was supposed to be different. That was supposed to be the moment where someone who actually understood risk sat across from you and asked the hard questions, Are you serious about this, or are you just playing trucker?
That moment doesn’t exist anymore.
Welcome to the age of instant-issue commercial trucking insurance. A credit card, fifteen minutes, and zero verification can now put an unvetted, potentially unqualified individual behind the wheel of 80,000 pounds rolling down the same highway as your family. Fully legal. Fully covered. At least on paper.
I’ve spent 25 years in this industry. I hold a CDL. I’ve owned and overseen large and small fleets. I serve as an expert witness in highway accident litigation and work as an insurance risk control and transportation consultant. I’ve seen what happens when things go right, and I’ve stood in the wreckage when they go way wrong.
I can tell you this, our best fleets, the legacy carriers with real safety programs, real training, real accountability, aren’t buying insurance from GEICO or Progressive. They’re in captives. They’re working with underwriters who actually understand what they’re insuring.
When I look at who’s covering a motor carrier, I can tell you almost immediately what kind of operation you’re dealing with. Subprime insurers cover subprime carriers. That’s not my opinion. That’s pattern recognition from a quarter century of watching this play out.
Right now, the instant-issue market is flooding our highways with exactly those kinds of operations.
How it’s supposed to work
If you’re running a professional fleet, a company with size, substance, and real skin in the game, you’re not shopping for insurance on a website. You’re often either in a group captive or a sole-member captive, and getting into one of those programs isn’t easy.
It was never supposed to be.
A captive works like this: best-in-class motor carriers come together and form their own insurance company. They own it. They control it. When claims stay low, the profit goes back to the members, not to some corporate insurer’s shareholders.
You have to earn your way in.
Real risk control professionals review your application. They dig into your programs, your policies, your procedures. They verify you’ve got proper driver qualification files, functioning safety programs, telematics that actually get used, training protocols that mean something. They want to know you’re defensible when the crash happens, not if.
Once you’re in, you’re not just a policyholder. You’re an owner with responsibilities. Risk control consultants review your violation data. Claims managers analyze your crash history. On-site audits happen. If your frequency exposure starts climbing and your risk profile deteriorates, you get placed on alert status. Consultants come in to work with you.
If you don’t improve, you’re out. Removed from the captive. No longer a member.
That’s accountability. That’s what insurance was designed to create, a system that protected insurers and the motoring public by keeping unfit operators off the road.
What’s happening now
GEICO has entered the commercial trucking market. Progressive has been there for years. Both are operating under a model that would make old-school underwriters physically ill.
The marketing says it all.
GEICO’s commercial truck program, backed by Berkshire Hathaway, is explicitly “designed just for the little guy, Motor Carriers and Owner Operators.” They’re advertising “quick purchase” options, credit card payments, and what they call an “innovative quoting system” that delivers “an instant price and coverage within minutes.”
No risk control review. No underwriter putting their hands on the file before issuance. Just self-attestation, payment, and a policy.
Progressive runs the same playbook. Enter your data, attest to your own qualifications, pay up, and you’re covered. This isn’t how commercial carrier insurance was ever supposed to work.
Here we are. A non-domiciled individual with no license, no office, no policies, and no particular concern for anyone else’s safety can go online, enter someone else’s information, maybe a proxy with a CDL they’re using as their “owner” and get instantly underwritten for considerably less than what legitimate insurance actually costs.
Welcome to trucking. Good luck out there.
The subprime layer
Below GEICO and Progressive sits another tier entirely, the subprime commercial carriers.
These are the surplus lines insurers, the non-standard markets, the companies willing to write policies for operations that nobody else will touch. You know the names if you’ve been around: Texas Insurance, Accredited Specialty, and a handful of others specializing in what they politely call “high-risk” coverage.
These carriers insure the carriers that can’t get coverage anywhere else. Bad CSA scores. Crash histories. Driver turnover problems. High-risk operations like municipal waste hauling where the exposure is through the roof.
When you see one of these subprime insurers listed on a carrier’s filing, it tells you everything you need to know about that operation’s risk profile.
The existence of subprime insurance isn’t the problem, someone has to cover high-risk operations. The problem is that the wall between subprime and standard coverage has essentially disappeared. When anyone can get instant-issue coverage without verification, the entire market drifts toward lower standards.
The floor drops for everyone.
Nuclear verdicts meet paper-thin coverage
Underwriting standards are collapsing at precisely the moment when the financial consequences of crashes are at their highest.
The average verdict in truck crash lawsuits exceeding $1 million jumped from $2.3 million in 2010 to $22.3 million by 2018. That’s a 967% increase in eight years.
By 2022, the median nuclear verdict, defined as any award over $10 million, hit $36 million. That’s 50% higher than the median in 2013.
In 2023 alone, 27 cases against corporate defendants resulted in verdicts exceeding $100 million. A St. Louis jury in 2024 handed down a $462 million verdict in a single trucking accident case.
Nuclear verdicts have tripled since 2020. Thermonuclear verdicts, those over $100 million, increased 35% in just one year.
Between 2020 and 2023, the average trucking verdict ran approximately $27.5 million. Some carriers have absorbed insurance rate hikes exceeding 100%. Others have simply closed their doors because they can’t afford coverage at any price.
While these verdicts are bankrupting legitimate carriers who played by the rules, we’re simultaneously making it easier than ever for high-risk operators to get on the road with minimal coverage and zero scrutiny.
Make that make sense.
The chameleon problem
Instant-issue insurance has a best friend, it’s the chameleon carrier.
Here’s how it works. A trucking company causes a catastrophic crash. Their minimum coverage, if it’s even valid, can’t come close to compensating the victims. Instead of facing consequences, the owner folds the company, walks away from the judgment, and reopens under a new name with a new DOT number and a new instant-issue policy. Often from the same insurers who covered them before.
The FMCSA calls them “reincarnated carriers.” The practice has existed for decades, but instant-issue coverage makes it trivially easy. Same owner. Same trucks. Same dangerous practices. New name. New policy. Back on the highway.
Take the case of William “Bill” Card, a 69-year-old Indianapolis man killed in a truck crash in 2021. The truck that killed him was operated by a single-truck owner carrying only minimum insurance. After the crash, the owner changed the company name and re-emerged as a different carrier.
The Card family received inadequate compensation. The person responsible for Bill Card’s death kept right on trucking.
When the chameleon carrier gets into a bad wreck, they swap names, change DOT numbers, and get new insurance.
FMCSA has tried to address this through their Application Review and Chameleon Investigation program, which uses software to flag reincarnated carriers by pattern-matching phone numbers, addresses, VINs, and other data points.
The system isn’t foolproof and when new authority requires minimal verification and insurance is available at the click of a button, the incentives still favor bad actors.
Chameleon carriers consistently show higher crash rates than legitimate new entrants. They undermine safety oversight and fair competition. And every time one reincarnates with a fresh instant-issue policy, everyone sharing that highway pays the price.
The $750,000 joke
The federal minimum liability coverage for most trucking operations is $750,000. That number was set by the Motor Carrier Act in the 1980s. It has never increased.
If it had kept pace with inflation, FMCSA calculated back in 2014 that the minimum should have been $1.62 million. Today, that inflation-adjusted figure sits around $5.5 million.
Let me show you how fast $750,000 disappears in a modern commercial crash.
A single tractor replacement runs $150,000 easy. One passenger vehicle involved, no injuries, adds another $50,000 to $100,000. Hit a traffic signal or transmission control box? That’s $120,000. Towing, hazmat cleanup, property damage, initial medical transport, you can blow through $750,000 before anyone even calculates pain and suffering or wrongful death damages.
Most people assume the $750,000 works like airline insurance, where each victim gets coverage up to that amount. It doesn’t. That $750,000 is the total available for ALL claims from a single incident. Five people injured or killed? That coverage is split among them, potentially up to $150,000 per person, which won’t cover a single catastrophic injury.
Whether you operate one truck or 500, the federal minimum is identical. A single owner-operator carries the same $750,000 requirement as a massive fleet moving millions of miles annually.
No sliding scale based on revenue. No adjustment for miles driven. No fleet-size multiplier. No year-end audit to reconcile actual exposure the way we do with workers’ compensation.
There have been proposals to raise the minimum to $2 million. New Jersey bumped its state requirement to $1.5 million as of July 2024. But federally? Still stuck in the Reagan administration. Still $750,000. Still wildly inadequate for the damage an 80,000-pound vehicle can cause.
Who pays
When a policy is exhausted and the carrier is judgment-proof, victims don’t simply absorb the shortfall. That excess has to go somewhere. The public pays.
Research on crash costs to the government shows Medicaid covers approximately 15.8% of hospital costs for motor vehicle crashes. Medicare picks up another 7.3%. And those figures don’t account for cases where catastrophic injuries force victims into indigence, making them newly eligible for Medicaid to cover all their medical care going forward, not just the crash-related bills. The burden extends beyond direct medical costs.
Social Security Disability Income increases when crash victims can no longer work. Welfare rolls expand. Food stamps. Housing assistance. Low-income energy assistance. Every safety net program sees increased demand when truck crashes leave people permanently disabled or indigent because insurance was inadequate.
Foregone taxes compound the problem. Injured workers stop contributing to the workforce. They stop paying into the systems that support everyone else.
So when a chameleon carrier folds after a crash, when an instant-issue policy turns out to cover a fraudulent operation, when minimum coverage can’t touch the actual damages, families suffer first. Then government programs absorb the overflow. Then taxpayers foot the bill.
Everyone pays except the people who created the risk.
The carriers who lie
Instant-issue coverage enables another flavor of fraud that’s become disturbingly common.
We have carriers declaring three vehicles and three drivers on their policy while actually operating twenty-plus trucks. When an undisclosed vehicle gets involved in a crash, the insurance company has contractual grounds to deny the claim.
“You lied on your application. You didn’t disclose this equipment or this driver. Coverage denied.”
Who does that protect?
Not the motoring public. Not the victim whose life just got destroyed by a truck that was never supposed to be on the road in the first place.
It protects GEICO. It protects Progressive. It protects the insurers who wrote that policy without ever verifying the application.
The instant-issue model creates a perverse incentive structure. Insurance companies collect premiums, maintain limited exposure through policy exclusions and misrepresentation clauses, then walk away when claims get expensive. Meanwhile, the barriers to entry for dangerous operators have effectively vanished.
If these insurers review policies months after issuance and discover problems, they can deny claims retroactively. By then, the damage is done. The crash happened. The victim needs care. And everyone learns the hard way that the “coverage” never really existed.
The broker bond farce
It’s not just carrier insurance. Freight broker bonds are equally broken.
Every freight broker in America must maintain a $75,000 surety bond. That number was increased from $10,000 in 2013 under MAP-21, which felt like progress at the time.
Whether you’re a small brokerage moving a few million in freight annually or TQL brokering over $1 billion, the requirement is identical. Same bond amount. Same protection.
If a mega-brokerage goes under, that $75,000 gets divided among potentially thousands of motor carriers owed money. They might see pennies on the dollar, if they’re lucky enough to file a claim before the bond exhausts.
FMCSA is finally addressing some trust fund loopholes. By January 2026, entities serving as BMC-85 trustees must be FDIC-insured depository institutions, insurance companies, or Federal Reserve members. Trust assets must consist only of cash, FDIC-insured letters of credit, or Treasury bonds, all liquidatable within seven days.
If available security falls below $75,000, carriers have seven calendar days to replenish or face automatic authority suspension.
It’s something. But the fundamental problem, that $75,000 is laughably inadequate for modern brokerage volumes, remains completely unaddressed.
What has to change
If we want acceptable risk on our highways, we need to return to an old-school underwriting model.
Every policy needs real underwriting review. Every application needs verification. Every carrier should demonstrate they have the programs, policies, procedures, and safeguards necessary to operate safely, and to be defensible when crashes inevitably occur.
Insurance should remain the barrier it was designed to be. Not just by cost, but by actually ensuring the carrier is fit to operate with a risk profile acceptable for public highways.
Minimum coverage limits need to reflect modern economic reality. A sliding scale based on fleet size, miles driven, or revenue, audited and reconciled annually like workers’ compensation, would ensure exposure actually matches coverage.
Broker bonds should scale with transaction volume. A brokerage moving $1 billion annually shouldn’t carry the same $75,000 bond as one moving $3 million.
Insurance companies that issue policies without verification should bear consequences when those policies turn out to cover fraudulent operations. They collected the premium. They should pay the claim.
This comes down to three questions every carrier should ask themselves, and every insurer should ask before writing a policy:
Who are you willing to hire?
What equipment are you willing to buy?
What are you willing to put on the highway alongside everyone else’s family?
If you can’t answer those questions honestly, you have no business operating. If an insurance company is willing to cover you without ever asking them, they’re not in the business of managing risk.
They’re in the business of collecting premiums and hoping nothing goes wrong.
The captive model worked because it required accountability. It created a community of carriers with skin in the game, operators who understood that their safety performance affected their fellow members. That model hasn’t disappeared. It’s just become increasingly exclusive while the bottom of the market turned into a free-for-all.
The last real barrier to entry has collapsed.
Until someone rebuilds it, until underwriting standards mean something again, until coverage limits reflect reality, until insurers bear responsibility for the risks they choose to cover, the motoring public will keep paying the price.
One crash at a time.
