Post by Fleet Safety Lane

Monday Morning Head-Scratcher: Did you know SMS is not a federal safety rating? That sounds obvious until you hear how people talk about it. FMCSA says SMS is used to help identify carriers for intervention and rank carriers against other similar carriers at a point in time. The SMS percentile rankings are not a federal safety fitness rating. A carrier can even have a Satisfactory safety rating and still exceed an intervention threshold in a BASIC. That detail matters. People start treating one screen like it tells the whole story. It does not. SMS can point toward problems. A safety rating means something different. Licensing and insurance are their own lane. Crash history needs context. And none of it gets easier when someone is staring at a public profile with half the background missing. The screen may be public. The meaning is not always obvious.