Brake Safety Week 2026: The True Cost of Brake Violations
Marathon Brake Systems experts Katie Benet and Bruce Williams discuss the true cost of brake violations, emphasizing that proactive maintenance, quality components, and consistent inspection programs are critical to preventing costly downtime, safety risks, and out-of-service violations during Brake Safety Week 2026.
Episode 375: Host Jamie Irvine is joined by Katie Benet, Strategic Account Manager, and Bruce Williams, Senior Director at Marathon Brake Systems, to discuss the upcoming Brake Safety Week and the significant business and safety consequences of brake-related violations.
Using industry inspection data showing that over 15% of inspected vehicles were placed out of service for brake defects, the discussion highlights how inadequate maintenance, deferred repairs, and the use of low-cost components can lead to breakdowns, lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, higher operating costs, and increased liability.
The guests stress that brakes must be viewed as a complete system, with regular inspections, documented maintenance programs, and timely repairs serving as the foundation of both fleet safety and profitability. They also remind fleet operators that while economic pressures may encourage cost-cutting, brake maintenance is one area where investing in safety and reliability delivers substantial long-term benefits for businesses and everyone sharing the road.
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Transcript of Episode
Jamie Irvine
Welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about Brake Safety Week. In 2025, Brake Safety Week was August 24th through 20th, 2025. We got a bunch of statistics from last year to review with you. In 2026, it will be August 23rd to the 29th. My guests today are Katie Benet, Strategic Account Manager, and Bruce Williams, Senior Director at Marathon Brake Systems. Katie, welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. Glad to have you here.
Katie Benet
Good morning. Thank you. Appreciate being here.
Jamie Irvine
And Bruce, nice to see you.
Bruce Williams
Yeah, same here, Jamie.
Jamie Irvine
So I don’t know if you realize this, but my very first interview on The Heavy Duty Parts Report was with your former president and Marathon Brake was the very first guest on the show. So that’s kind of cool to go full circle. We are now episode 375. So that’s, yeah, that was a while ago, almost 6 full, 7 full years.
Katie Benet
Wow, no, I did not know that. That’s really cool.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, So we’re here to talk about Brake Safety Week. According to the CVSA, inspectors conducted 15,175 inspections during Brake Safety Week ‘25, they placed 2,296 vehicles out of service for brake related violations. And this resulted in a 15.1% brake out of service rate. The leading violation was vehicles having 20% or more of their service brakes in and out of service condition, accounting for 1,199 violations. Inspectors also reported 306 brake hose violations, 199 steering axle brake violations, and 100 air loss rate violations. So today our conversation is going to focus on a critical question. What is the true cost of brake violations? First of all, I just wanted to get your reaction to those numbers. And do they indicate progress or continuing industry challenges? What’s your thoughts? Bruce, I’ll let you go first.
Bruce Williams
Sure, yeah. So listen, Jamie, 85% got me through high school. But when we’re talking brakes, I really think we got a lot of room to work. We need a few more A’s on the report card, right? So, you know, 85% being encouraging, that 15% is still entirely too high. Most problems should be found before that vehicle is put out of service for sure.
Jamie Irvine
Katie, with 15% not making it through, from your perspective, what separates the fleets that are consistently in the 85%, they’re passing their inspections and the ones that aren’t?
Katie Benet
It’s really what they’re paying attention to, right? Do we have scheduled maintenance? Are we keeping up with it? Are we using the right products that go together on that truck, right? I think that there’s a lot of progress that’s been made, but there’s still just so much more that’s not even that costly to be able to improve those numbers and keep a lot more trucks on the road.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, that concept of the right product for the job. I know when I was selling Marathon brakes for a distributor, one of the things I always started the conversation with was really surrounding the operating environment that these equipment are in. And that has such a big impact on the decisions that you should be making relative to the brakes that you’re using.
Katie Benet
Yes. No, there’s so much that goes into it, right? It’s not just one component that goes on there. It’s everything working in a system together. And when you have one of those things that you’re only as strong as your weakest link, So, you can put a lot of effort into keeping up on certain components and then, cheapen it off on some of it is what’s going to cost you the money in the long run anyway.
Jamie Irvine
Right. So the most cited violation last year was the brake violation where at least 20% of the brakes were out of service. That’s 1,199 vehicles that they identified that were so unsafe that they had to be taken off the road. It’s a little scary for people to think about. That’s just the ones they caught. How many more are out there? So Bruce, what does a finding like that tell us about maintenance practices in the industry?
Bruce Williams
Yeah, Jamie, so you know, just to touch on what you said, the 15% is very concerning when you think about that tractor trailer is a 40 ton vehicle rolling down the road coming at you and it has, brake violations on it. That’s super concerning to me. I believe that the largest portion of that 15% is, due to older equipment and it’s, particularly on the trailer side, you think about there’s three trailers generally to every truck. And a lot of times those trailers don’t get the same maintenance that concern or focus that truck gets. The truck is probably, it’s either an owner-operator or a fleet that has a program. The trailer is owned in some cases by somebody else. A lot of times it’s sitting in a field until it’s needed and then it’s pulled out. So the smaller fleets, the second and third owners that maybe don’t have the strong maintenance programs, incomplete histories, you know, based off of the vehicle that they’re towing behind them. I think that’s where a big portion of this may come from.
Jamie Irvine
When I was selling parts and I was talking to different customers, it was always surprising the range that you got from the very focused groups that were focused on safety. They were focused on lowering their cost per mile. They understood the numbers and the implications of what they were doing. And there’s a huge spectrum from there all the way over to give me the cheapest thing you’ve got, I got to get back on the road. Right?
Bruce Williams
Yeah, for sure. You know, at Marathon, we think it’s really just simple, right? It’s inspection and maintenance. Should be routine, not something we gear up for once a year and use quality products behind it.
Katie Benet
Yeah, I think there’s so much education that goes into it too. You know, like you mentioned, talking to customers and if a customer will actually lend you their ear, I think you can make it a lot further with the safety items and them understanding what the cost and impacts of that type of stuff is. And most of them do, I think, make a change in a positive way if they really will open their ears up. But a lot of times it’s just, you know, if they don’t know, they head down the cheaper route.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah and it always surprised me how sometimes I would work with a customer and I would do that education and then a couple years down the road, I’d find that they’d slid back into old behavior. They got seduced by that lower purchase price, right? So for our listeners, let’s do a little bit of a review on that because if a vehicle gets placed out of service, obviously there may be a tow bill and then there’s going to be the repair. But what are the other costs that people are not thinking about that need to be understood?
Katie Benet
Yeah, I would say that there’s a ton of costs, right? Like you mentioned, there’s the tow bill, which is the smallest of it. How much time are you spending off the road, what you’re supposed to be doing, the load you’re supposed to be taking, and then just the accessory repair, right? You’ve got the repair on what was out of service, possibly premature, and then other components and things like that that may have been an issue in that out of service or, jeopardize by having the wrong materials on that truck. I think that, you can’t even really count all of the things that go into the, determine of getting that truck off of the road there.
Jamie Irvine
You mentioned earlier, Katie, that there is the need to look at your brakes as a system. And I think that’s so important. You touched on that, right? All of the different components, the premature wear, and then the labor, right? The time, if you’re doing the repairs internally at your own shop, you’re paying a mechanic, otherwise you’re paying an hourly labor rate. And so you’ve got all that downtime, you’ve got labor, like there is so much that goes into that and that price just goes up and up and up. And unfortunately, it’s not easy for customers to see that on, you know, an invoice. They see the cost of the part, they see the labor maybe, but that’s it. They don’t see all the other costs that are that are stacking on top of that.
Katie Benet
Especially when it is an emergency right you know it’s like at your own house you know the plumbing always goes out on a holiday weekend or something happens where your furnace stops working and it’s Sunday afternoon and to pay to get someone out for something like that costs a lot more than on your day-to-day Monday, Tuesday where you’ve planned it and had someone come out to prematurely check it. So it’s that same type of system, right?
Jamie Irvine
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If you look at the data, CVA’s data shows that. 2,296 vehicles were immediately removed from service until repairs could be completed. So walk us through the real-world impact on those companies, their business, that we’ve talked about the impact on their equipment. What kind of a negative impact have you seen on businesses when they don’t get this right?
Bruce Williams
Yeah, Jamie, so listen, you know the old saying, if the wheels aren’t turning, you’re not earning, right? And unfortunately, the bills keep coming in, you know, they don’t stop. So when that truck stops, the revenue stops immediately at that point. So drivers sitting, you know, the freight may be delayed, dispatch has to completely rebuild their plan. You know, they’re gonna send a tow truck or they’re gonna send a replacement truck out. You know, you gotta maintenance must locate the parts, you know, dispatch, road service, I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on. So there’s a lot of expense tied behind that brake failure when in reality the brake repair itself is generally the cheapest piece of the whole deal.
Jamie Irvine
Katie, you’re a strategic account manager. That tells me that you work with your customers who are in really competitive marketplaces. What risk is there to a business if they start to have these violations, these out of service, that unplanned downtime, what happens there in that really competitive marketplace? What other risks could they face?
Katie Benet
I mean, they face a ton of risk, right? You know, it’s one of those things where if you need it now, you don’t care what it costs. All of the budgeting that you do, all of the planning, you know, all of those strategic conversations go out the window the second that you’re in a position where you need something today. Instead of having that plan, being able to utilize the resources that you’ve spent so much time setting up, I think that a lot of them see that and see such a big impact that it’s a waste for a lot of the efforts that you build into as a business. And then, too, you’re throwing your people through a loop when you go through those type of things. It creates an environment that other things might get out of whack and has just trickle-down effects from there.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, and I’m thinking about too, from the perspective of we’ve had this prolonged freight recession in the US over a number of years, according to statistics, we’re finally out of it. But the reality is, the freight market’s just gotten so much more competitive. We’ve seen companies go bankrupt. That has reduced the supply, I guess, a little bit on freight, but I still see it as such a hyper competitive market. And you do anything that the competition can start pointing and saying, don’t go with them. You should go with us, that’s going to be pretty detrimental to a business as well. And I don’t think a lot of people would ever kind of necessarily automatically connect the dots between our brake maintenance program and that. But in my opinion, if enough of this stuff is happening and you’re not reliable, it’s got to impact the bottom line on how much freight you can move.
Katie Benet
So I would just say, you know, we see customers come up with these great contingency plans. We see there’s a lot of effort towards it too. And you know, as the supplier, we also get involved, whether it’s making sure that we can get product to certain places, but you know, there’s cost to it, there’s cost to it for everybody, right? And as a supplier, right, we try our best to take our portion of the cost, but it does get passed down. So, you know, if those contingency plans aren’t perfect and aren’t, you know, well-developed and discussed, then, you know, that just doubles and triples the cost that gets shared between everybody involved.
Jamie Irvine
Right, Bruce, you’ve been in the business, so you understand how competitive the marketplace is. What do you see as an impact on customers when they’re unable to deliver and their competition is leveraging that against them?
Bruce Williams
Jamie, the customers are going to judge the fleet by the delivery results. They don’t really care about their maintenance plan or if they continue to have repeated breakdowns, it’s going to jeopardize their credibility to their customers, and it becomes a customer retention problem. So low margin, unplanned downtime, that can erase the profits of the fleet pretty quickly. But when you lose a customer, that’s irreparable sometimes.
Jamie Irvine
When I look at the data, I see other infractions, right? There were 306 brake hose and two violations, 100 air loss rate violations. These indicate issues that develop sometimes over time. What does this tell us about the cost of deferred maintenance? Because obviously in all of these cases, they were pushing, you know, they were kicking that can down the road. So Katie, from your perspective, what is the true cost of deferred maintenance?
Katie Benet
Yeah, I mean, it’s exactly that, right? You push that off, you think, okay, we’re not gonna do it this time around, even though the truck might be off the road, we’ll save that for the next time. And then you end up halfway to where you plan to be, or you don’t have a plan in place to get there. And then you’re just adding more and more and more off time, you’re adding more and more damage to other portions of the truck and the maintenance system. So it’s all just one system that works together and we see that all the time. And then no matter how good of a product, when you’re deferring maintenance on it, you’re jeopardizing what hard work you put into it to begin with.
Jamie Irvine
Right, and Bruce, from your perspective, like I know when I was selling parts, I would always encourage my customers to try to look at that whole system and while you’re in there, change what you can, right? So from your perspective, where does the cost of deferred maintenance really hit hard?
Bruce Williams
Yeah, you know, Jamie, it’s kind of like going to the dentist, right? You can either take care of that problem, that small problem today, or it’s certainly going to become a much more expensive, painful issue. So those small issues tend to become larger ones, whether it’s the brakes, the hose, the fittings, it’s the complete system, like Katie had said earlier. And it really goes back to routine inspections and the routine maintenance and having a good program in place.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, I don’t have the money to change the bearings and the brake material today. Well, are you going to have the money to change the spindle and the axle later? Or are you going to have the money to cover like a wheel off or something like that? Like to me, it’s just, man, it is so dangerous to push that maintenance down the road. Katie, again, you’re dealing with strategic customers. So I assume that when you deal with a larger customer, they have a viewpoint on liability and risk management. Can you explain to us what the standard or maybe what the gold standard should be when you’re looking at that from a maintenance perspective?
Katie Benet
Yeah, I would say with our customers, the nice thing, especially in the strategic realm is safety is a bigger priority. We’ve had to take out insurance policies for customers that we sit around and we look at them sometimes in these contracts and we’re like, there would have to be some pretty big issues here. And it’s great to have that. It’s great, especially with brakes. That is the most important thing when you consider you, your family, your friends driving down the highway. So it is good to see that there’s a lot of focus on that. It’s one of those things that we’re happy to share the investment on to just make sure that we’re all in a good, safe place when it comes to that.
Jamie Irvine
Right. And the reality is people’s lives are at risk and these nuclear verdicts are out there and they do happen. So better to be safe than sorry. Let’s talk for a minute. I just want to kind of review. So if we look at the major findings of last year, defective brakes, right, steering axle violations, air loss problems, drum and rotor defects, a lot of this is preventable. And I think it’s important for people to understand where the big fleets put their time and attention so that if you’re running a smaller operation and you’re trying to build a fleet yourself, you have the right perspective. So just maybe walk us through like where, what is most preventable? How should they approach maintenance based on what we saw in last year’s report? Bruce, do you want to try to tackle that?
Bruce Williams
It goes back to what we’ve been saying all along. It’s having a good maintenance program in place to catch those. Listen, the brakes don’t, they don’t break overnight. right? It’s a slow trend that takes place, either that hose or that rotor or that drum, it wears over time. And, it didn’t just wake up one day and say, hey, it’s broke, right? So you got to have a good maintenance program in place to identify those before they put you down on the road.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, so okay, a good maintenance program. So walk me through what are the key elements of what we would call a good maintenance program?
Bruce Williams
It’s consistent. It’s you know, you got to have it repeated over and over. And then you’ve got to document your findings and then you got to repair those findings. You know, don’t don’t postpone them. Don’t it’ll make one more trip out before we before we get caught or before it puts us down. And I think that’s what our larger fleet do. They they have that in place. So preventive maintenance, being repetitious and identifying the problems and repairing those problems.
Jamie Irvine
Awesome. All right. So there’s the three key steps. So based on your experience with working with fleets, if we think about last year and we think about all the things that led up to those companies having equipment being taken out of service, we’re now fast approaching Brake Safety Week ‘26. If someone’s listening to this, what is like the one thing that you want them to think about before Brake Safety Week 2026 Katie.
Katie Benet
I would say just really think about the overall cost of what you are doing and not just the cost financially but the cost you know, to anybody that’s on the road with you. I think that, you know, obviously every year for the past six years has been a very interesting year. This is no different. Everyone feels really, really, really squeezed, right? And I think everyone’s been very hesitant with spending money and whether this is an investment year or if this is a pullback year, brakes is just not the place to pull back. You know, on a heavy truck, like what we deal with, there’s not, a lot of great places to pull back, but brakes is really, really, really not the place. You know, there’s other things that you can do. I know that a lot of these companies are squeezed. I know that it’s rough out there. You know, we’ve talked about the freight recession. We’ve talked about all of the other obstacles. But, you know, if this is the business you’re in, you have a responsibility to make sure that what you are putting on the road with everyone’s loved ones is something that is not going to potentially kill somebody. So, making those adjustments, it’s not just about whether or not you’re going to lose money, being off for a couple days, but really about the bigger worldly cost that goes along with it.
Jamie Irvine
You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. We’ve been speaking with Katie Benet, Strategic Account Manager, and Bruce Williams, Sales Director at Marathon Brake Systems. If you don’t know about Marathon Brake Systems, head over to marathonbrake.com. I highly recommend it. is some of the best friction material in the market. I’ve sold it for many, many years off and on throughout my career and just it’s been a pleasure to work with Marathon Brake. They truly do have product that will lower your cost per mile and they have solutions for your specific problems. So definitely check them out. Katie, thanks so much for coming on The Heavy Duty Parts Report. It was nice to finally meet you.
Katie Benet
Nice to meet you as well.
Jamie Irvine
And Bruce, thanks so much for your contribution. I really appreciate you taking the time today, sir.
Bruce Williams
Jamie, thank you and we appreciate the opportunity to come on your show.
Jamie Irvine
And thank you for listening right to the very end. If you have listened all the way to the end, you are a very special member of our audience and we greatly appreciate you. Why not head over if you haven’t already and follow the show wherever you get your podcasts on YouTube. You can find all the links on heavydutypartsreport.com. Thank you again and as always I want to encourage you to be heavy duty.
