The History of a Motor Carrier

When you open up the DOT report, there are a lot of places you could look to see the history of a motor carrier. The first place the History tab starts is a historical snapshot at the top. The historical snapshot shows you the history of the motor carrier at each renewal, based on their renewal history.

For example, this motor carrier had its last renewal in 2026, since that's the most recent renewal date. We show a snapshot of what the motor carrier looked like across the last four renewals, to give you a good perspective of what that motor carrier looked like at each renewal. We show the insurer's name, the number of trucks, the number of drivers, the number of miles, and other MCS-150 data. This gives you the ability to see what the underwriter would have seen, and the public didn't, when the insurance was bound.

If you want more than what the historical snapshot provides, scroll down to the History section. Here we can see, at a glance, a calculation of all seven BASIC safety scores going back two years, graphed over time. It also shows a month-by-month calculation of their ISS score over that same two-year window, also graphed. If any of those BASIC scores are above the intervention threshold set by the FMCSA, you'll see a red dot on that score, making it easy to spot for the client.

If you scroll further, you'll find a more detailed view of the motor carrier's insurance filing history. This shows more information about each filing and the complete set of actions taken on each filing over time. This level of detail matters because some insurance companies will post a filing and then just leave it in place, rather than submitting a new filing. This insurance history tells you what actually happened with the motor carrier's insurance filings — more than the historical snapshot alone will tell you.

So that's a quick recap of what the motor carrier looked like at each renewal via the historical snapshot, while the full insurance history on the History tab gives you more detail. Below that, you'll find a history of other insurance filings, history related to MCS-150, and history all the way back to the inception of the motor carrier's record.

Now let's talk about crashes, inspections, violations, equipment, and cargo. For crashes, we show every reportable crash for the past twenty-four months, including crashes that were removed through FMCSA's DataQs process when they were deemed non-preventable. Inspections and violations shown also cover the past twenty-four months — that means equipment violations and equipment seen over that same twenty-four-month window of time. Your view of cargo has the same time perspective: the Cargo tab shows an analysis of the carrier's cargo as seen through inspections over the same twenty-four months.

And there you have it — that's a complete view of how we've built time and historical perspective into the DOT Analysis report. If you have any other questions about this, or anything else about DOT Analysis or anything you see on our platform, please reach out to anyone on our team. I hope you have a fantastic day — we'll see you next time.