Each year, the NTARC Major Incident Investigation Report provides a comprehensive picture of heavy vehicle incidents in Australia. Widely referenced across industry and government, it has become an annual benchmark for how the transport sector is tracking on road safety and where the most significant risks remain.
What’s less visible is the collaboration behind the report, and the people whose combined expertise turns complex data into insights that can inform real-world decisions.
NTARC, the National Truck Accident Research Centre, is a partnership between NTI, the Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) and the National Road Safety Partnership Program (NRSPP). Together, the three organisations bring industry data, academic rigour and practical communication together in a single initiative designed to improve safety outcomes across Australia’s road network.
Three of the key contributors to the most recent Major Incident Investigation Report are Adam Gibson, Transport Research Manager at NTI; Dr Jasmine Proud, Data Scientist and Researcher at MUARC; and Jerome Carslake, Director of the NRSPP, whose perspectives reflect the breadth of that partnership.
Different paths to NTARC
Adam Gibson’s path into transport safety began in engineering rather than insurance. A specialist heavy vehicle mechanical engineer by training, he has worked across vehicle and trailer design, testing and certification.
“That took me into a space where I had a lot of touchpoints with transport regulation,” he says. “The regulation of transport is, at least in theory, the regulation of transport safety. But you can get frustrated pretty quickly with how indirect some of those controls are.”
That frustration eventually led him into roles more directly focused on safety outcomes, before joining NTI in a position that aligned his technical background with a stronger sense of purpose. “I was offered a senior engineering role the same day as this one,” he says. “And I had to decide whether to take the pinnacle-of-your-engineering-career role, or this job that was much more purpose-aligned. It’s pretty obvious which way I jumped.”
For Adam, the importance of the NTARC report starts with recognising the realities of safety in the transport industry.
“For anyone who’s an outsider to transport, it’s important to understand that safety here isn’t about a twisted ankle or a paper cut,” he says. “This is an industry that sees something north of 60 workers die in workplace incidents every year. So safety is a very real issue.”
For Dr Jasmine Proud, the move into road safety research was less a deliberate pivot than an opportunity that aligned with her broader focus on workplace injury prevention. “Previously I was in wearable robotics,” she explains. “When the opportunity came up to work at MUARC and with the NRSPP, I joined the team and was thrown straight into NTARC. It’s a fascinating space to do research in.”
Jerome Carslake brings another perspective again, shaped as much by lived experience as by professional background. Growing up on a farm in regional Western Australia, road trauma was a familiar part of life. “You lost a few mates,” he says. “On the day I got my driver’s licence, one of my friend’s brothers rolled his ute and died. Whenever I look at my licence, that memory still pops up.”
That grounding in agriculture later shaped how he approached transport policy and safety. As he moved into roles focused on transport and road safety, he became increasingly aware of the gap between regulation and the realities of how vehicles are used on the ground.
“Instead of fighting policy battles, I took regulators out to farms and ag shows,” he says. “It busted a lot of myths. There was this idea that farmers were cutting corners or trying to move loads irresponsibly. But once people saw the machinery and the environments it operates in, they understood the constraints and the risks much better.”
How the NTARC partnership works
At the foundation of the NTARC partnership is NTI’s claims data; a large, longitudinal dataset drawn from major loss incidents involving heavy vehicles across Australia. As the country’s largest insurance provider for heavy vehicles, NTI accumulates this information through the ordinary process of managing claims.
“In the act of spending hundreds of millions of dollars repairing or replacing trucks every year, we’re effectively paying people to tell us about those adverse events,” Adam says. “We know what happened, where and why.”
He contrasts this with the limitations of traditional road safety datasets. “Most road safety work globally is based on police-reported incident data, and that can create distortions,” he explains. “There’s a whole cohort of incidents, particularly single-vehicle events, that never make it into police data. Insurance data captures those events because if someone wants their vehicle repaired or replaced, they have to tell their insurance provider what happened. That’s what makes this dataset different.”
Once that data is assembled, the analytical work begins. Jasmine leads the research and analysis of the Major Incident Investigation Report, working closely with Adam throughout the process.
“My role is to apply an academic research lens,” she says. “We’re very fortunate that NTI takes the time to code their data in detail, including contributing factors, which allows us to look beyond individual incidents and understand what’s driving them.”
One of the report’s key strengths, Jasmine says, is its national perspective.
“The Major Incident Investigation Report looks at heavy vehicle crashes nationally, which is actually very difficult to do using jurisdictional crash data alone,” she says. “It allows us to move beyond isolated snapshots and start understanding what’s happening consistently across the country.”
Adam, who wears “a few different hats” across the lifecycle of the report, then steps back in to sense-check the analysis and consider how it will land with industry. From there, the NRSPP plays a critical role in ensuring the findings are clear, relevant and usable.
“So much good research never reaches the people who could extract value from it,” Adam says. “The NRSPP does an incredible job of communicating complex findings and connecting them with the people who need them.”
An evolving approach
While the NTARC Major Incident Investigation Report has long been a trusted reference point for industry, its scope and ambition have shifted over time.
Adam has seen that evolution firsthand. “If you go back to the earlier reports from around 2007 to 2009, they were essentially a data dump of business-as-usual insurance processing data,” he says. “What’s changed is the move away from purely operational insurance questions toward secondary analysis; pulling out insights that are more relevant to what the transport industry actually wants to know, rather than what an insurance company might traditionally ask.”
As the focus of the report has matured, so too has the way its findings are shared. “We understand a massive report on its own isn’t necessarily going to resonate with truck drivers,” Jerome says. “So now we have the big report, then the highlights, and then toolbox talks for industry.
“That way, organisations can say, ‘This is why we’re focusing on this risk,’ and have more targeted conversations with drivers around issues like inattention and distraction. At the same time, you can show where things are improving, like fatigue, and demonstrate maturity and progress.”
From insight to action
For Jerome, the NTARC report exists to confront the reality of what’s happening on Australia’s roads, and to ensure that reality can’t be ignored. “We have a big increase in road trauma across the country,” he says. “Deaths and serious injuries are going up.”
That makes transparency critical.
“Once you collect the data, you know about it so you can fix it,” Jerome says. “If you’re not collecting it and you’re not talking about it, you can’t fix it. And if we’re pushing it out there and making it very clear what the data is saying, people can’t just put their heads in the sand and say they had no idea.”
From a research standpoint, Jasmine sees the report’s value in how clearly it supports more targeted responses. “This data lets you break it down,” she says. “You can look at heavy vehicle occupant deaths and ask, ‘What’s the major cause? If we were to address that, what do we need to look at?’ Then you can look at other road user deaths and ask whether the issue is the interaction between heavy vehicles and cars.
“From there, you can start to see which issues relate to road infrastructure and which are about driver training, and what that means for where effort and intervention should be focused.”
For Adam, that’s ultimately what the report is meant to achieve: better decisions that lead to safer outcomes. “We want to give people the best information we can about the hazards they face,” he says, “in the hope that we get as many people home safely at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the year. That’s really the mission here.”
© 2026 NTI Limited ABN 84 000 746 109 AFSL 237246
This article contains general information only and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. You should obtain professional advice based on relevant personal circumstances. Our products are subject to limits and exclusions. NTI is not responsible or liable for your use or reliance on the information in this article.