One of the many ways trucking companies avoid liability by putting all responsibility for fuck-ups on the driver.

This scene immediately popped into my head.

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Exactly, so the use of "crash" would generally be far better for these sorts of articles.

"Accident" starts addressing intentions or expectations.

We could just add easily refer to them as "vehicular violence" but then we'd end up distorting things in another direction.

It doesn't have to be on purpose. Accident implies that something was just a freak occurrence beyond anyone's control. You can't fix accidents. You can fix crashes.

If you're driving negligently - drunk driving, not paying attention, etc then it's not an accident.

If it's due to bad road design, then it's not an accident.

Colloquially, accidents are random events without intention or fault.

That's why there's a push to use neutral terms like "crash" that don't imply that the "accident" was just a random accidental mistake.

And fault is often a bit of a misnomer. Many crashes are the result of bad design, but the courts would never say "this pedestrian fatality here is 40% the fault of whichever insane engineer put the library parking lot across a 4-lane road from the library but refused to put a crosswalk there or implement any sort of traffic calming because that would inconvenience drivers".

While many accidents do involve fault, there are scenarios where an accident can occur without anyone being legally at fault (mechanical failure, natural disasters). It does excludes malicious intent though. in the specific context of commercial motor vehicle regulations in the US, the term "accident" is defined in the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (e-CFR) under 49 CFR § 390.5