If you converted these statistics into "deaths caused by trucks per thousand/million/or whatever vehicle miles travelled", you would find that trucks cause far fewer deaths than other vehicles for the distance they travel.

But when these big trucks do hit something, whatever they hit is going to stay hit and the people in the whatever it hit will probably be dead.

And yes, maybe the truck driver 30% of the time in those fatalties was half-asleep at the wheel, but thank goodness there are only 7 million truck drivers on the road at any one time, when the number of half-awake SUV and car drivers on the roads at the same time is probably 10 times the half-asleep large truck driver numbers.

And by all accounts, many car and SUV drivers (especially it seems), are never actually fully awake any time they are behind the wheel of their vehicle.