How Our Amazon Trucking Investigation Came Together

One of my favorite things about being an editor is watching other reporters in action. I’m routinely amazed by their techniques and perseverance, both of which are necessary to produce excellent journalism.

Paris’s efforts around her five-month investigation into the safety of Amazon’s highway trucking expansion were nothing short of impressive. And since I enjoyed the very small part I played in her journey (shared much more by her wonderful editor, Nick Wingfield), I thought I would reveal some of it to you by interviewing Paris. 

You may be surprised to learn how these stories actually come together as well as the issues we’re still trying to pin down.

Jessica: How did you get onto this story?

Paris: I was working on a story we published in November about Amazon’s expansion into trucking, and I somehow stumbled upon a commercial motor vehicle enforcement report from the Vermont Department of Transportation. Some Vermont fuel association had published copies of the agency’s enforcement reports, and one of them said something like, “All these Amazon pop-up companies are frequently out of compliance.” 

I thought, if this is happening in Vermont, where there are no Amazon warehouses, what’s happening in Texas or California, where they have a billion? It turns out what is happening is these horrible crashes and these terrible events that are connected to Amazon trucking, but are not connected to Amazon from a liability perspective because they are technically independent companies. 

If the companies are independent, how could you identify that the trucks responsible for the crashes you wrote about were carrying freight for Amazon?

This is what took the most time and was the hardest part. Normally in commercial trucking, there is a license associated with a trucking company and regulators attach accidents to that license. But because Amazon predominantly uses independent companies, the accidents go under those companies’ license numbers instead of Amazon’s. 

What I ended up doing was tied to the fact Amazon has 30,000 of its own branded trailers—because it wants billboards on wheels. I would find photos of Amazon trailers that had been involved in crashes or descriptions in police and news reports.

I scoured public records and local news reports for vehicular homicide, as well as, strangely, the Twitter accounts of sheriffs’ departments and highway patrols, and I ended up following the trail of Amazon branding and Amazon packages. In some cases a tractor would fall over a vehicle and Amazon packages would fall out of it. 

Tell us about the big court cases coming up. 

One of the cases that is worth paying attention to involves an Amazon Freight Partner, one of a number of companies that has agreed to haul loads exclusively for Amazon in an Amazon-branded tractor. Amazon provides the vehicle, and the driver is an employee of this small company. 

In one of the cases I mention in the story, a truck driver drove off the road and over the median, killing one man and severely injuring another. It appears to be the first time Amazon has faced a legal challenge when it owns the vehicle and has gone from having a lot of control to having even more control. The program helps these contractors get off the ground, Amazon is their sole client, and they have almost total control over how they operate and the money they can earn while using Amazon vehicles.

The case is in the state of Florida, which allows the owner of the vehicle to be held at least partially liable for the actions of its driver. In past litigation, Amazon was able to weasel its way out of any responsibility; in this case, it may be harder for Amazon to do that completely, and it could set precedents for future cases. 

How did Amazon respond?

It was interesting. I worked with Amazon’s trucking public relations quite a bit in our reporting. I put a lot of work into a number of direct questions I sent them, and we ended up getting a single on-the-record statement and some background after weeks of back and forth that didn’t answer the questions, so that was a bit frustrating. So hopefully as we continue to report on this, it will get a bit easier.

What went unanswered in your reporting?

One of the first questions I asked Amazon: Do you track the number of accidents drivers hauling your freight are involved in? 

I never got an answer one way or another, as simple a question as that is. We also didn’t get answers as to Amazon’s overall accident rate, which is frustrating because there is no way to have a direct comparison to other companies because of the decentralized nature of the system. That is a frustrating question to be left with. 

This is an industrywide problem that began with trucking deregulation in the 1970s. Every e-commerce company is trying to find a way to deal with it. Consumers won’t buy something if it takes 20 days to arrive and they won’t buy it if shipping costs $20. It often ends with this unclear liability question. It’s hard to pinpoint liability.