"The company has already limited their liability, they can cover their a** quickly by showing that you freely accepted the load, the shipper has no control over what happens so they are left out but you as the driver have all the responsibility and will bear the brunt of the problems. It is you that made that decision and you that, as Leo indicated "turned the key"."
True enough, the carrier can show that you freely accepted the load, but a jury will be asked to decide if that carrier was negligent in knowingly allowing a driver to accept a load that was unsafe to run. And the jury will largely be made up of people who think a 5 hour drive is an exhausting ordeal and a full work day is 8 hours. Most juries will not be able to fathom that you can drive 15 or 16 hours, sleep for 5 or 6 hours, and then keep on driving. If you have an accident near the end of that trip, they won't even bother to fathom whether or not it is safe.
If you are ever on a load and are on the phone with dispatch, and you mention that you are tired, sleepy, or that you'll be glad when you deliver so you can go to bed, and the carrier allows you to continue driving, and you get into an accident, that phone call will be pulled and reviewed by the DOT and by any lawyers involved in the subsequent civil and criminal trials.
In a trial, they will go after whoever has the deeper pocket, be it the driver, the vehicle owner, or the carrier. Guess who that is likely to be? Common sense, integrity and ethics of the driver is meaningless when it comes to potential liability in the millions of dollars. That's why most carriers have rules or policies in place to limit the driver's risk of an accident, and thus limit or eliminate their own liability.
Drivers who run these ridiculous miles without substantial breaks other than fuel, food and restrooms, and then say they completed the trip safely, are really only saying they completed the trip without having or causing an accident. While fatigue cannot be precisely quantified, your level of alertness and your response times are diminished when you are fatigued. Just because an accident didn't occur doesn't mean you weren't fatigued to the point where you were a danger to yourself and to others. A lot of people drive accident-free while drunk, but that doesn't mean they were safe.
A prudent carrier will have limits set on solos drivers to minimize the liability. They have to. Panther's 16 hour rule, while far from perfect, seems to be a very good compromise between limiting their liability and in letting an unregulated driver in an unregulated vehicle keep from being regulated by the same Draconian one-size-fits-all DOT HoS rules as the regulated vehicles are subject to.
By and large it's a good rule, it's just that sometimes it gets applied with absolutely no common sense or intelligence whatsoever. Too often they cling to that 47 MPH thing and make a determination as to whether or not you can deliver the load within the allotted 16 hours (at 47 MPH) without a 5 hour break, and if not, if you add in the 5 hour break, does that still leave you enough time to deliver. Sometimes assuming 47 MPH is the right thing to do. Like, a 1000 mile run from Buffalo, NY to Montgomery, AL. But a far, far different kind of trip would be a 1000 mile run from Tulsa, OK to Flagstaff, AZ. The driving times (not to mention driving stress levels) would be much different for each run, yet Dispatch is locked in on that 47 MPH, with common sense and intelligence not playing a factor.
