NTI’s 2023 NTARC Report Summary
NTI conducts extensive transport industry research, and we share the insights to help improve safety for all road users. This year, NTI focused on safety within the dairy industry and delivered Australia’s first driver safety training program via our “Spilt Milk” Project.
The initiative was developed after research revealed dairy tankers were 2.4 times more likely to be involved in a major crash than other freight-carrying heavy vehicles.
You can access research results and training materials via www.nti.com.au/dairy-safety.
Further to NTI’s dairy industry analysis, below are the key findings from our 2023 NTARC Major Accident Investigation Report:
- There was a slight decline in the overall frequency of losses, to 2.52 incidents per 1000 insured units, down from 2.63 in 2021, when excluding natural peril events such as impacts from major flooding experienced on Australia’s eastern seaboard in February and March 2022. The inflation adjusted incident cost threshold for inclusion was $80,500.
- In-scope incidents continued to increase from 1001 incidents in 2021 to 1282 incidents in 2022. The majority of this increase is accounted for by the ongoing growth in NTI’s insured portfolio, with some resulting from the effect of inflation on the fixed $50,000 incident cost threshold for inclusion in this report.
- If natural peril events are included, there is a small but significant increase to 3.06 incidents per 1000 insured units, reflecting the unprecedented scale of the 2022 flood event.
- As a result of extensive flood events, Natural Peril losses jumped from being a near irrelevancy (~1%) to being 14.5% of all heavy motor large losses (>$50k).
- Increases in mechanical failure and fire losses may have causal links to the same high rainfall events responsible for the natural peril losses.
- Minus flooding losses, incidents caused by fatigue is stable with prior years, while inappropriate speed incidents have increased.
- Ensuring we have well-trained, healthy and empowered drivers needs to remain a key industry focus. This is because while crashes due to driver error have decreased, the combination of driver error, fatigue and inappropriate speed, which are considered to be primarily ‘human factor’ crashes, still account for three out of every five (60%) losses in the dataset (with natural peril excluded).
- Incidents caused by driver error inattention/distraction remains a key issue, with two out of five driver error losses having this sub-coding.
- The truck and car fatal at-fault proportion has partly reversed the decline seen in 2021’s data, with the insured truck not at fault in fatal truck and car crashes in 77.4% of incidents.
You can access previous editions of the NTARC Major Accident Investigation Report via https://www.nti.com.au/better-business-hub/ntarc