A 25-year-old Salt Lake City man died Thursday afternoon after his van slammed into the back of a semi-truck on westbound Interstate 84 near Wendell, Idaho, in a crash that shut down a lane of the freeway for roughly two hours. The collision happened around 4:45 p.m. at milepost 150.8 in Gooding County, a stretch of rural interstate that has seen fatal truck crashes before.
According to ABC4 Utah, the man was driving a 2001 Dodge van westbound on I-84 when it rear-ended a 2020 Freightliner semi-truck that was towing a 2018 utility trailer. Idaho State Police responded to the two-vehicle crash near milepost 150, west of Wendell, and the van driver died from his injuries at the scene. The 64-year-old semi-truck driver, from Mount Judea, Arkansas, was not injured, ABC4 reported.
Emergency crews from the Gooding County Sheriff's Office and Wendell Fire Department assisted Idaho State Police at the scene, according to East Idaho News. The right lane of westbound I-84 was blocked for around two hours before it reopened once emergency services finished responding. Officials have released no additional information, and the crash remains under investigation.
A Stretch of Highway With a Deadly History
This is not the first fatal crash at this exact section of westbound I-84. The same stretch near milepost 150 outside Wendell was the site of a prior fatal collision in January 2022, when a passenger vehicle collided with a Freightliner semi-truck, according to the same East Idaho News report. That earlier crash also drew a response from Gooding County emergency personnel, underscoring the corridor's recurring risk for drivers sharing the road with heavy trucks.
Wendell itself is a small agricultural community of 2,917 people sitting along the I-84 freight corridor between Boise and Twin Falls, per data cited by East Idaho News. The interstate functions as the primary commercial artery through Gooding County, meaning passenger vehicles routinely share narrow rural stretches with a steady stream of semi-trucks.
New Law Lets Trucks Match Car Speeds
The crash comes less than two months after a significant change to Idaho's trucking laws took effect. Under Idaho House Bill 664, heavy commercial semi-trucks have been permitted to travel up to 80 mph on rural stretches of Interstate 84 since July 1, eliminating the state's longstanding 10 mph lower speed limit for commercial trucks, as reported by East Idaho News. Governor Brad Little signed the bill into law in March, and it took effect statewide this summer.
Lawmakers who backed the change argued that equalizing speeds between trucks and passenger cars would reduce dangerous passing interactions on rural highways, while safety advocates warned that 80,000-pound semi-trucks require significantly longer braking distances at highway speed, East Idaho News noted. Research cited during the bill's legislative proceedings found that a 10 mph speed differential between semi-trucks and passenger cars increases dangerous traffic interactions by as much as 227%, a figure lawmakers used to justify uniform speed limits on rural interstates.
Rural Roads Carry Most of Idaho's Fatal Crashes
Idaho recorded 252 traffic deaths across 28,127 motor vehicle crashes in 2025, a 5% increase over the prior year, even as the overall number of crashes dipped slightly, according to the Idaho Transportation Department. Rural roadways accounted for 66% of all fatal crashes statewide, a pattern that has held for years in commercial truck collisions specifically — historic data from the department's Office of Highway Safety shows 66% of fatal commercial motor vehicle crashes in Idaho happen on rural roads, even though rural routes account for less than half of overall truck accidents.
Speed remains the single largest contributing factor in fatal aggressive-driving crashes across the state, playing a role in 48% of such collisions and 99 deaths in 2025, per the same transportation department data. State law also sets clear expectations for following distance: Idaho Code Section 49-638 requires drivers to maintain a reasonable and prudent gap based on speed and road conditions, a standard that creates a legal presumption of driver inattention or following too closely in rear-end collisions, according to Justia Law.
Idaho State Police have not yet said what caused Thursday's crash, and the investigation remains ongoing. ABC4 Utah says it will continue to update the story as more information becomes available.
