What to Do After a Truck Accident in California: The Evidence That Disappears First

A truck crash is not just a bigger car crash. The law that governs it is different, the insurance behind it is different, and most importantly, the evidence that decides it does not belong to you. It belongs to the trucking company. And a good deal of that evidence sits on a federal clock that starts running the moment the crash happens.

That is the part almost nobody tells injured people. Knowing what to do after a truck accident in California is partly about the obvious things, getting medical care and calling the police. But it is also about a narrower and more urgent problem: several categories of evidence that could prove the driver was fatigued, the brakes were bad, or the carrier knew about both, can be lawfully destroyed on a schedule measured in months. Some of the digital evidence can be gone in days.

The first hours: the ordinary steps still matter

Start with the basics, because they are the foundation for everything else.

Call 911 and make sure a police report is generated. In California, commercial vehicle crashes on state highways are usually handled by the California Highway Patrol, and serious ones may be assigned to a specialized investigation team that reconstructs the collision in technical detail. That report is worth waiting for.

Get medical attention the same day, even if you feel able to walk away. Adrenaline masks injuries, and a gap between the crash and your first medical visit is the single most common argument an insurer uses to suggest you were not really hurt. If you do not have health insurance, that is a solvable problem, and we walk through the options in our guide on getting medical treatment after a crash with no insurance.

Photograph everything you safely can: both vehicles, their positions, the roadway, debris, skid marks, and any visible markings on the truck and trailer. Write down the company name and the USDOT number if you can see them. Get names and phone numbers for witnesses, because they scatter quickly and police reports do not always capture everyone.

And be careful with the phone calls that come next. The trucking company’s insurer may contact you within a day or two asking for a recorded statement or a signed medical authorization. You are not required to give either one, and doing so early, before anyone knows the full extent of your injuries, rarely helps you.

Why truck cases turn on evidence you cannot see

In a two car collision, most of the proof is in front of you. The damage, the police report, the witnesses, the medical records.

In a truck case, the decisive evidence is usually inside the carrier’s own systems. How many hours the driver had been working. Whether the brakes had been flagged and not fixed. Whether the company had been warned, repeatedly, by its own safety software that this driver ran hot. None of that is visible at the scene, and none of it is in your possession.

There is also a timing problem. Serious crashes tend to bring a rapid response from the carrier’s side. Transportation defense firms and insurers openly market round the clock crash response, and a team may include defense counsel, an accident reconstructionist, and a technician who can download data from the truck’s engine computer. They can be working the scene while you are still in an emergency room. That is not sinister, it is their job, but it does mean the other side often has a head start measured in days.

The records a trucking company can legally destroy

Federal regulations require motor carriers to keep certain safety records for a minimum period. What surprises people is how short some of those minimums are, and that once the period runs, a carrier can generally destroy the record as part of routine business practice, assuming no preservation demand or litigation hold is in place.

These are minimums, not expiration dates. A carrier may keep records longer, and many do. But you should not count on it.

Record	Federal rule	Minimum retention
Driver logs (electronic records of duty status)	49 CFR 395.8(k)	At least 6 months from receipt
Supporting documents: bills of lading, dispatch and trip records, fuel and toll receipts, fleet messaging, payroll	49 CFR 395.11	At least 6 months
Driver qualification file	49 CFR 391.51(c)	Length of employment, plus 3 years
Maintenance and inspection records	49 CFR 396.3(c)	1 year, plus 6 months after the vehicle leaves the carrier’s control
Driver vehicle inspection reports (DVIRs)	49 CFR 396.11	3 months
Accident register	49 CFR 390.15(b)	3 years

Look at the first two rows again. The driver’s hours of service logs and the paper trail that would expose a falsified log, the fuel receipts and toll tickets and dispatch records that place the truck somewhere the log says it was not, carry the same six month floor. If you first contact a lawyer eight months after the crash, the fatigue case may already be harder to build than it needed to be.

One clarification worth making, because it gets garbled online. The regulation on supporting documents limits how many documents a carrier must retain for hours of service verification, generally up to eight per driver per day. That is a compliance rule about log verification. It is not a cap on what can be requested in a lawsuit, and it does not mean the company only has eight relevant records.

The data on the truck disappears faster than the paperwork

Paper and digital records have a predictable minimum life. The data on the vehicle itself often does not.

Heavy trucks are not covered by the federal rule that standardizes event data recorders in passenger vehicles, which applies to vehicles rated at 8,500 pounds or less. That does not mean a big rig records nothing. It means the opposite of standardization: most heavy trucks carry an engine control module that captures useful information around a hard braking or sudden deceleration event, things like speed, engine RPM, throttle position, and brake application, but what gets captured and how long it survives varies by engine manufacturer, software version, and how the truck is configured.

What is consistent is that this memory is finite. The module generally holds only a limited number of recent events, so later hard braking can push the crash data out. Continued driving, repairs, or disconnecting the battery can all affect what remains. There is no reliable universal rule here, which is precisely the problem. The only dependable answer is a prompt forensic download by a qualified technician, before the truck goes back into service.

Camera and telematics systems are their own category. Many carriers run forward facing and driver facing video through vendors like Lytx, Samsara, Netradyne, or Motive. These typically record continuously to local storage and loop over themselves, and a hard impact usually triggers an automatic upload of a short clip around the moment of collision. That short clip is often preserved. The hours of routine footage before it, which is where you would find a driver looking at a phone or fighting sleep for forty minutes, generally is not. How long it survives depends on the hardware, the storage capacity, and the vendor’s settings, but it can be a matter of days once the truck is back on the road.

Those same systems also generate a running history of safety events for each driver: hard braking, speeding, following too closely. When a company had that record and kept the driver on the road anyway, it becomes relevant to what the company itself knew.

The two hour drug and alcohol testing window

Federal rules require post accident drug and alcohol testing in defined circumstances, not after every crash. Testing is required when the collision involves a fatality. It is also required if the driver is cited for a moving violation and the crash caused an injury requiring immediate treatment away from the scene, or disabling damage requiring a tow.

The timing is where it gets interesting. An alcohol test is supposed to be administered within two hours. If it is not, the employer must prepare and keep a written record explaining why. The employer must stop trying after eight hours. For controlled substances, the outer limit is thirty two hours.

That written explanation is a document. It exists because a rule required it, it is dated, and it can be requested later. When a carrier skips a required test, the absence of a test and the reason it gives for the absence both become part of the record.

What to do after a truck accident to protect the evidence

Here is the part that separates a truck claim from an ordinary car claim: somebody needs to tell the trucking company, in writing and quickly, to stop its routine deletion practices and preserve specific things.

That letter goes by a few names, usually a preservation demand or a spoliation letter. It is not a court order and it does not by itself guarantee anything gets preserved. What it does is establish that the company was on notice, identify exactly what you are asking it to keep, and remove any later argument that the destruction was innocent routine housekeeping. A duty to preserve can also arise from the circumstances alone, so the letter is not the only thing that can create one. It is simply the clearest and fastest way to put the issue beyond dispute.

A well drafted demand identifies the crash, the vehicles, and the driver, and then asks for specific categories:

• Electronic logging device data, including edits, audit trails, and unassigned driving events
• Engine control module and event recorder data, plus any download reports already generated
• Forward facing and driver facing video, including routine footage and not only the triggered clip
• GPS and telematics data, dispatch and routing records, fuel and toll records, and fleet messaging
• The driver qualification file, training and discipline records, and drug and alcohol testing materials
• Inspection, maintenance, and repair records for the tractor and trailer
• The physical tractor, trailer, tires, brakes, and any removed components
• Accident register entries and records of prior similar events

Two practical notes. Do not try to inspect or move anything on the truck yourself. And preserve your own side of the record too: photographs, the clothing you were wearing, your vehicle before it is repaired or salvaged, your medical records, and every communication you receive from any insurer.

What California courts actually do about destroyed evidence

People often assume that if a company destroys evidence, you can sue them for it. In California, generally you cannot.

In Cedars-Sinai Medical Center v. Superior Court (1998) 18 Cal.4th 1, the California Supreme Court declined to recognize a separate tort claim for intentional spoliation of evidence by a party to the case, at least where the victim knew or should have known about the destruction before the underlying case concluded. The following year, in Temple Community Hospital v. Superior Court (1999) 20 Cal.4th 464, the Court reached a similar conclusion for destruction by someone who is not a party.

So the remedy is not a second lawsuit. The remedy lives inside the case you already have. Courts can impose discovery sanctions under Code of Civil Procedure section 2023.030, ranging from monetary penalties up to barring a party from presenting certain evidence. And California Evidence Code section 413 allows the jury to consider a party’s willful suppression of evidence, which is reflected in the standard jury instruction on that subject, CACI 204. In plain terms, a jury can be told it may infer that destroyed evidence would have been unfavorable to the side that destroyed it.

None of that is automatic. A court generally looks at whether a duty to preserve had arisen, whether the conduct was culpable or merely routine, whether the evidence was actually relevant, and whether its loss caused real prejudice. Which loops back to the preservation letter. The earlier and more specifically you asked, the harder those questions become for the other side to answer comfortably.

Who can be held responsible, and why that changed in 2026

A truck case often has more than one defendant. Beyond the driver, the motor carrier may be responsible for the driver’s conduct and for its own decisions in hiring, training, supervising, and maintaining equipment. There may also be a cargo loader, a maintenance contractor, or a trailer owner in the picture.

Freight brokers are the piece that just changed. A broker arranges the load and selects the carrier, and for years brokers argued that state law negligence claims against them were preempted by federal law, which shut many of those claims down early. Federal appellate courts split on the question.

On May 14, 2026, the United States Supreme Court resolved it. In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, a unanimous Court held that state law negligent hiring claims against freight brokers fall within the federal statute’s safety exception and are therefore not preempted. A broker that selects a carrier with a poor safety record can now face that claim on the merits rather than having it dismissed at the threshold.

Two honest limits. The Court assumed rather than decided one part of the preemption analysis, so the issue is not entirely closed. And the provision governing purely intrastate broker arrangements does not contain the same safety exception, a question the Court expressly left open. In California, where a large share of freight moves between the ports and inland warehouses without ever crossing a state line, that distinction may matter in a real case.

You can look up a carrier’s own safety record yourself through the FMCSA’s SAFER Company Snapshot, which shows operating authority, insurance filings, and inspection and crash history. It reflects aggregated past data, not a company’s internal safety alerts, but it is a reasonable starting point.

The insurance ceiling

Federal rules set a floor, not a ceiling, and the floor is old. Interstate carriers hauling general non-hazardous freight in vehicles rated over 10,000 pounds must carry at least $750,000 in liability coverage, an amount Congress set in 1980 and that has never been adjusted for inflation. Carriers hauling oil and certain hazardous materials face $1 million, and the highest risk materials require $5 million. Bills to raise the general minimum to $5 million have been introduced repeatedly, including in the current Congress, and none has passed.

California sets its own requirements for intrastate carriers under Vehicle Code section 34631.5, and they are not a copy of the federal schedule. The general requirement is $750,000, with a lower $300,000 figure for carriers operating only vehicles under 10,000 pounds, and separate treatment for bulk petroleum and hazardous loads.

Many carriers, particularly larger ones, carry far more than the minimum through excess and umbrella layers. But in a catastrophic case the available coverage can still fall short of the harm, which is when your own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage becomes part of the conversation.

Your deadlines

Evidence deadlines and filing deadlines are two different clocks, and the filing clock is the one that ends the case entirely.

Claim	Deadline	Source
Injury claim against a private trucking company	2 years from the crash	CCP 335.1
Wrongful death	2 years, running from the date of death	CCP 335.1
Claim involving a public entity vehicle or a dangerous road condition	6 months from accrual, presented to the agency	Gov. Code 911.2
Late claim application if the 6 month window is missed	Within 1 year of the incident	Gov. Code 911.4
Vehicle and property damage	3 years	CCP 338(c)

The six month government claim deadline is the one that catches people, and it applies if a city truck, a transit vehicle, a Caltrans vehicle, or a hazardous roadway condition is involved. Missing it is serious but not always the end, because a late claim application and a court petition for relief exist as backstops. We cover the mechanics in more detail in our guide to the California statute of limitations for car accidents. Every situation has its own wrinkles, so treat these as the outer boundaries rather than a plan.

Frequently asked questions

How long is commercial truck dashcam footage kept?

There is no federal rule requiring dashcams or setting a retention period. Most fleet camera systems record to local storage on a continuous loop and automatically upload only a short clip triggered by a hard impact. The routine footage before the crash can be overwritten within days once the truck returns to service, depending on the hardware and the vendor’s settings.

What is a spoliation letter in a truck accident case?

It is a written demand sent to the trucking company and its insurer asking them to suspend routine document destruction and preserve specific categories of evidence. It does not guarantee preservation, but it establishes notice and makes later destruction much harder to explain as ordinary business practice.

What happens if the trucking company destroys the driver’s logs after six months?

Federal rules require logs and supporting documents to be kept for at least six months. If no preservation demand or litigation hold was in place and no duty to preserve had otherwise arisen, destruction after that period may be lawful. If a duty had arisen, a court can impose discovery sanctions or allow the jury to infer that the missing records would have hurt the company’s case.

Is every truck driver tested for drugs and alcohol after a crash?

No. Testing is required when there is a fatality, or when the driver is cited for a moving violation and the crash caused an injury needing immediate treatment away from the scene or disabling damage requiring a tow. Alcohol testing is supposed to happen within two hours, with a written explanation required if it does not and an eight hour cutoff. Controlled substance testing has a thirty two hour limit.

Can I sue the freight broker that hired the trucking company?

Often yes, following the Supreme Court’s May 2026 decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, which held that state law negligent hiring claims against brokers are not preempted by federal law. Whether such a claim fits your facts depends on what the broker knew or should have known about the carrier it selected.

How much time do I have to sue a city or state truck in California?

A claim against a public entity generally requires a formal written claim presented to the agency within six months, which is far shorter than the two year deadline for a private company. If you miss it, a late claim application within one year may still be available.

How quickly does the truck’s engine data disappear?

It varies by engine manufacturer and configuration, which is exactly why it is urgent. These modules store a limited number of recent events, so subsequent hard braking can displace the crash data, and repairs or continued driving can affect what survives. A prompt forensic download is the only reliable way to capture it.

Is it too late if my crash was months ago?

Not necessarily. The filing deadline is usually two years, and evidence held by third parties, police agencies, hospitals, and nearby businesses may still exist. But the sooner a preservation demand goes out, the more of the carrier’s own records are likely to still be there.

Talk to someone before the clock runs out

The hardest thing about a truck case is that the most important work happens early, at exactly the moment an injured person has the least capacity to do it. If you or someone in your family was hurt by a commercial truck in Los Angeles or anywhere in Southern California, the practical step is to get a preservation demand out quickly and get the vehicle data secured before the truck goes back to work.

Power Legal Group handles commercial vehicle cases throughout California. Contact us for a free consultation. Every case turns on its own facts, and nothing here is a promise about how yours will turn out, but the one thing that is true across all of them is that the evidence does not wait.