CMT Launches Carrier Safety Scoring for Brokers, Three Months After the Supreme Court Made Picking an Unsafe One Expensive

Cambridge Mobile Telematics announced on Sept. 2 that it is extending its road-safety platform, until now sold mainly into personal auto insurance, to freight brokers and motor carriers. The product, called Freight Safety Intelligence, scores carriers on real-world driving behavior collected over a rolling 90-day window, giving a broker a risk read on a prospective hauler before a load is tendered rather than after something goes wrong.

CMT says its underlying crash-risk models, developed for consumer telematics programs, have already been credited with preventing more than 126,000 crashes and 68,000 injuries worldwide. The freight version applies the same behavioral scoring — hard braking, speeding, phone distraction, following distance — to commercial drivers whose carriers opt in to share the data, then hands brokers a score they can weigh alongside a DOT number and insurance certificate.

The launch partner is B4 Logistics, a freight broker. "The B4 Logistics name is built on trust, and that starts with putting safe drivers on the road," CEO Brad Bergstrom said in CMT's announcement. CMT co-founder and CEO William V. Powers framed the pitch around the carrier side of the transaction too: "Every day, millions of families share the road with commercial trucks, and every load moved by a safer carrier makes those families safer."

Why brokers are buying now

The timing traces to a Supreme Court decision three months old. In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, decided May 14, the Court unanimously held that state-law negligent-hiring and negligent-selection claims against freight brokers are not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act's economic-deregulation clause, because they fall within that statute's safety exception. The opinion's own language is direct: "Requiring C.H. Robinson to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier therefore 'concerns' motor vehicles." The ruling reversed lower courts that had shielded brokers from this category of suit and reopened a path plaintiffs' attorneys had spent a decade trying to reestablish.

That matters because the safety-rating system brokers have relied on to show "ordinary care" has a large hole in it. CMT's own announcement cites the same gap regulators have flagged for years: 94% of interstate freight carriers operate without a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration safety rating at all, leaving brokers with little more than a DOT number and an insurance certificate to document due diligence. Large-truck crashes remain a live liability variable behind that gap — NHTSA data cited by CMT puts the annual death toll from crashes involving large trucks above 5,000.

What changes for brokers now

A behavior-based score is a new signal, not a new mandate, and its usefulness will depend on adoption mechanics brokers should watch closely.

Coverage is opt-in, not universal. CMT's score only exists for carriers that agree to share telematics data, which in practice means brokers can run it against CMT's own device-equipped customer base and partners like B4 Logistics, not the full carrier population they book against. A broker's due-diligence file will show a score for some lanes and nothing for others — a gap a plaintiff's attorney could point to just as easily as a broker could point to a good score.

It also creates a new form of documentation risk. Post-Montgomery, a broker's carrier-selection process is now something a jury can examine under an ordinary-care standard. A logged safety score checked at time of booking is evidence a broker can point to if a carrier it vetted is later involved in a crash — but a score a broker had access to and ignored, or never checked, could work just as easily against it. The tool changes what "ordinary care" can be shown to look like; it does not by itself define what the standard requires.

Finally, brokers are now leaning on a third party's proprietary model for a number that could matter in litigation. CMT has not published its scoring methodology, so a broker adopting Freight Safety Intelligence is trusting CMT's validation work rather than auditing it directly — a dependency that did not exist under the DOT-number-and-insurance-certificate status quo, however thin that status quo already was.