How risky is this carrier to write — and when can you quote it?
Type a USDOT number. You get a preview of DotRadar’s Underwriting Radar score — crash loss as a severity-weighted rate per truck-year, high-verdict venue exposure read from where the trucks actually run, coverage adequacy and operating hazard — plus the incumbent insurer and the renewal window. Free, no sign-up, one carrier at a time.
Underwriting arithmetic, not lead-vendor counting
Most carrier lookups hand you a crash count. A count is not a risk. A 500-truck fleet with eight reportable crashes is a materially better risk than a 20-truck fleet with three, and any tool that shows both as a number is asking you to do the division yourself.
Underwriting Radar does the division. Crashes are scored as a rate per power-unit-year and weighted by outcome the way a loss run weights them — a fatality counts three times a tow-away, an injury one and a half — then read against the real distribution rather than a hunch:
The scale is measured, not invented. We sampled 1,458 carriers with five or more power units against every federally reportable crash in the trailing 24 months. 88% of them had none at all — 95% of fleets under ten trucks. Among carriers that did have crashes, the median severity-weighted rate was 0.043 per truck-year and the 99th percentile was 0.107. The component tops out at 0.14, so a score here means something against the population instead of against a round number someone liked.
That last point matters more than it sounds. “No crashes on file” is the normal state of a trucking carrier, not a distinguishing one, and a tool that presents it as a clean bill of health is flattering nearly every carrier you look at. This one tells you what share of comparable fleets are equally clean.
What we will not tell you
The federal open portal does not carry SMS BASIC percentiles, out-of-service ratios or the safety rating — the single largest component of the model, 30 of its 100 points. It does not carry confirmed public suits, and it does not carry the cargo and operating detail you would need to judge whether a filed limit is actually thin. Those 51 points are drawn as a hole in the bar rather than quietly scored as zero, because scoring an unknown as good is the dangerous direction of error for anyone pricing a risk.
For the same reason there is no letter grade or band on this page. The product’s bands are calibrated against all 100 points; mapping a 49-point subset onto them would grade every carrier better than it deserves.
How to read what comes back
The renewal date is the part everyone wants and the part most tools get wrong, so this one tells you which of three things you are looking at.
The insurer put a term-end date on the federal record. This is a fact, not our arithmetic. It is the only case where we will tell you a quoting window is open.
The filing is recent but open-ended, so we infer a one-year term from its effective date and label it as an inference. Useful for planning, not something to quote against.
The filing has stood open for years. A BMC-91X does not expire, so the record genuinely does not say when this policy renews. Anyone showing you a date here is guessing.
One number that is almost always misread. The coverage amount is what the insurer filed with the FMCSA, and for most freight carriers that is the federal minimum rather than the real policy limit. A carrier showing $750,000 may well carry far more. Confirm the true limit on the certificate.
Why we built the one nobody else did
Free USDOT lookups are everywhere — a dozen sites will hand you a carrier's authority status and safety scores. None of them answers the question an insurance producer actually has, which is when can I quote this account.
That answer is not in any single field. It has to be read out of the filing history, and the filing history is genuinely misleading: FMCSA's date columns are text, so sorting them the obvious way puts every December filing above every January one regardless of year. A carrier that switched insurers in January still reads as its December incumbent. Filings can be dated years into the future. And because a BMC-91X never expires, plenty of live filings are two decades old with no end date at all — add twelve months to one of those and you print a renewal date in 2005.
We got all four of those wrong before we got them right. What you see above is the corrected read.
See how producers use it →