The bus left Cuiabá on Friday evening, August 8, 2025, bound for Sinop, and it left full. At Nova Mutum it took on still more passengers and rolled on toward the São Cristóvão community, near kilometer 648 of the BR-163 outside Lucas do Rio Verde, some 360 km from Cuiabá. There, on a curve in the dark, the double-decker interstate coach collided with a semi-truck. Eleven people were killed and 46 injured, and for communities along one of Brazil’s main highways the count is the part that will be hardest to forget.
The mechanics of the crash, as the first accounts give them, are brutally simple. A survivor told the local portal Terra MT Digital that the bus driver attempted an overtaking move across a continuous line, where the maneuver is prohibited; the official forensics service, Politec, says the bus invaded the truck’s lane, the carriageway running toward Sinop. The impact caught the coach on its left flank and practically tore the entire side open. The full expert report on the dynamics and causes has yet to be written.
The toll built through the night. Nine people died at the scene; one more died in an ambulance racing toward Nova Mutum; and overnight a young woman who had been admitted in grave condition died at Hospital São Lucas in Lucas do Rio Verde, where most of the injured were taken. The dead include the bus driver and a passenger who was riding in the truck. On the truck driver the early reports split: Terra MT Digital’s overnight account counted him among the dead after he had been rescued, while Globo’s G1, in an updated report the next morning, placed him among the twelve injured admitted in serious condition. Of the 46 hurt, the concessionaire counted 26 in moderate condition, 12 in serious condition and eight with light injuries.
What it means for people on the ground showed itself within hours. Firefighters, federal highway police, SAMU paramedics and rescuers from the Rota do Oeste concessionaire worked the wreckage under lights, and the BR-163 stayed closed in both directions with long queues building. By Saturday morning crews were still pulling the vehicles apart, the bus winched aside to the roadside and the truck being lifted, a job the concessionaire called complex given the gravity of the crash and the size of the vehicles. Civil police are expected to open an inquiry, hear the survivors and weigh the overtaking attempt; the bodies are being identified across three facilities, five taken to Politec in Sinop and four to Nova Mutum.
The company behind the bus, Rio Novo Transportes, says the vehicle was a double-decker seating up to 70 and carrying 66 people at the moment of impact. Nothing was said, in the first day’s accounting, about the other nine. The firm lamented what happened and opened a dedicated channel to assist victims and their families, who across the region spent the weekend waiting for names.
The road itself has a record, and locals know it by heart. Concessionaire data counted well over thirteen hundred accidents on the BR-163 in 2024, 65 of them fatal, and 40 deaths in the region in the first half of this year alone. In February a grandmother and her granddaughters, aged 2 and 8, were killed when their car hit a truck at Nova Mutum; in April, five people died near Matupá and Guarantã do Norte. Terra MT Digital calls Friday’s crash “a maior tragédia registrada este ano na rodovia em Mato Grosso”, the biggest tragedy recorded this year on the highway in Mato Grosso. Closer to home, that is what it is: not a statistic but a bus full of neighbors. The inquiry will ask why a full coach tried to pass where passing is not allowed; the families will carry the answer either way.
Sources
- Tragédia na BR-163: colisão entre ônibus e carreta deixa 11 mortos em Lucas do Rio Verde – TERRA MT DIGITAL
- Batida entre ônibus e carreta deixa 11 mortos e mais de 40 feridos na BR-163 | G1
