Lawsuits out of Arizona allege Amazon hires unqualified and unvetted carriers

PHOENIX — Tens of millions of people turn to Amazon daily for convenience, its fast delivery promises, and price, but lawsuits filed in Arizona allege the system Amazon created to find carriers to haul its freight has led to unqualified and unvetted drivers representing them on the road.

For Demetrius Ivey, the events of December 12, 2022, are fuzzy.

“Most terrifying thing I ever experienced in life,” said Demetrius Ivey. “I don’t actually remember everything because after I got hit, I went out.”

Photos help to fill in the gaps. 

Ivey was on the I-10 exit ramp in Phoenix near 7th Avenue. He was turning right when a large tractor-trailer pulled up next to him, also turning right. Ivey’s attorneys allege in a lawsuit that the truck driver cut the turn too tightly and hit the driver’s side of Ivey’s car.

“I did have police asking me, you know, ‘are you okay and everything?’ I really didn’t have much of a response to know if I was okay or not,” Ivey said.

The lawsuit said the commercial truck was owned by a company called Solid Road Express, but it was pulling an Amazon trailer.

“They do a great job of getting packages to people really quickly, but they sacrifice safety because of that,” said Ryan Skiver, Ivey’s attorney.

Ryan Skiver and Kellen Bradley of Skiver Bradley are personal injury attorneys who specialize in truck crashes.

They are representing Ivey in his lawsuit against Solid Road Express and Amazon, both of which deny responsibility.

“They have this huge demand to get things to customers right away. And so what they do is they have a lot of their own drivers, but when they can’t meet that full demand, they need to go find third parties,” Bradley said.

In the lawsuit, Skiver and Bradley are critical of the system Amazon created to find third-party carriers.

It’s called Relay, and it allows third-party carriers to book assignments to haul freight loads on behalf of Amazon.

“This enables thousands of small and medium-sized businesses to pick up freight on their schedule. Whether it be one-off loads or more frequent, Relay offers flexible options for third-party carriers. We have rigorous safety criteria for carriers, and suggesting otherwise is inaccurate and would be intentionally misleading,” said an Amazon spokesperson.

The Amazon spokesperson said carriers in the Relay program are evaluated when they sign up and have a list of requirements.

Skiver and Bradley, however, argue Amazon has not hired a sufficient number of well-trained and qualified drivers to meet the company’s needs, so they turn to unqualified and unvetted drivers.

“They put these loads up on a Relay board, sort of like an auction. Many times, they go to the lowest bidder. And in many people’s experience, the lowest bidder is not often the most safest option,” said Alex Scott, an associate professor of supply chain management at the University of Tennessee.

Scott is also skeptical of some of the carriers working for Amazon through the Relay app.

“Traditionally, big shippers like Walmart and Target directly contract with larger carriers. But Amazon has this app in which they’re working with small carriers, new carriers, those without much of a safety record, often people new to the industry,” Scott explained.

In Ivey’s case, the I-Team found that Solid Road Express was a new entrant with the Department of Transportation.

“The bigger concern is these new entrants, which anyone can sign up to start a trucking company,” Skiver said. “So they’re not rated, or they’re considered unrated, before the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration does an audit to determine if they’re safe or not.”

Amazon said the crash between Solid Road Express and Ivey involved unauthorized subcontracting. It’s when a carrier outsources a job to another carrier without Amazon’s approval.

Amazon said that the practice is in direct violation of its policies, and they work to aggressively police it, but it happened in this case.

Amazon said it has permanently barred nearly 2,000 carriers for unauthorized subcontracting.

A year after the crash, Solid Road Express was issued an out-of-service order, and its new entrant status with the DOT was revoked.

In October of 2022, Shane Baer was driving on the I-17 in Bumble Bee when he said he was rear-ended by a truck driver.

“I would say pretty much the trunk ended up at the back seat of my car. It ended up pretty much totaling everything,” Baer described.

Baer also filed a lawsuit with Skiver and Bradley as his attorneys. The lawsuit alleges the truck was owned by a company called General Freight Lines Inc., and it, too, was pulling an Amazon trailer.

“It really is an 80,000-pound truck going against a one-ton car, and the truck always wins, and that’s exactly what happened in this situation,” Skiver said.

Baer’s lawsuit also alleges:

“Data shows that companies that haul Amazon’s freight are systematically more likely to have poor safety scores, and that as Amazon ramped up its freight effort, it used trucking companies with repeat safety violations.”

Based on General Freight Lines’ data from the past two years, it has an out-of-service rate of 33%, which is ten percentage points higher than the national average.

An out-of-service violation happens when a carrier does not pass safety regulations during a roadside inspection, which immediately prohibits the vehicle or driver from operating until the problem is corrected.

Sam Stephenson, an Amazon spokesperson, said looking at out-of-service rates alone does not tell the whole story, especially for smaller carriers. He said Amazon uses BASIC scores to assess carriers delivering on the company’s behalf. Amazon believes that method is more stringent than what the FMCSA requires.

Stephenson said Amazon has barred more than 21,000 carriers for not meeting BASIC standards.

“The DOT does not have the resources to do in-depth investigations of all of these carriers on the road,” Scott said. “It’s up to the shipper, the Amazons of the world, to make sure that the carriers that they are using are safe and responsible.”

In Scott’s research, he found that in 2024, Amazon worked with more than 11,000 different carriers. Compared to Costco, Target, and Walmart, Amazon used twice as many outside carriers as those retailers combined.

After Scott looked at the number of carriers with unsafe hours of service and poor vehicle maintenance, he concluded that an inspected Amazon load had a carrier with a very high unsafe driving score 14 percent of the time, compared to Walmart at 5 percent.

“So Amazon, if you compare to their peers, is generally hiring less safe carriers,” Scott said.

Amazon disputes Scott’s methodology.

A spokesperson declined to answer how many crashes its carriers have been in in the past few years. Stephenson gave 12News a statement, which says in part:

“Since 2019, we’ve invested over $2 billion in safety measures globally, supporting new technologies and programs to help our employees and partners. Beyond these investments, we have a dedicated team of engineers building safety measures into our Relay suite of technology, which carriers use to book and execute work for Amazon.

“We’ve implemented driver ID verification for every load, ensuring we know exactly who is handling our shipments. And we’ve updated our equipment with industry-leading improvements consisting of flashing auxiliary lamps and additional conspicuity tape to more than 60K of our branded trailers. 

We’ve also updated our safety guidance and trip planning features, providing drivers with route-specific weather forecasts, in-app alerts, satellite imagery for destination orientation, and truck-safe navigation that prioritizes interstate use. 

Additionally, we’ve expanded our safety learning modules and introduced integrated inspection tools in the Relay app, allowing carriers and their drivers to report any equipment defects and cancel work as needed.”

Amazon believes its standards meet and often exceed legal requirements.

As for Baer, he has had to undergo multiple surgeries due to the injuries he suffered in the crash. Ivey said he has had to go through months of physical therapy.

They and their attorneys want Amazon and its carriers to be held accountable and hope the company becomes more selective when choosing who it allows to transport its freight on the road.

“They can be a great company and offer a great service,” Bradley said. “What a responsible company should do is take responsibility, take accountability, and make some changes within their company so that these things don’t happen as frequently.”

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