I have written before about trucking accidents, and it goes without saying that accidents involving cars and semi-trucks are often devastating for the car occupants. Furthermore, it is always a major concern to me when a piece of equipment that is supposed to prevent injuries actually causes more significant injuries. I want to make it very clear that I believe underride bars are an essential piece of safety equipment. However, it is evident that they need to be made even safer in order to maximize their effectiveness in helping to save drivers’ lives.
What Happens When An Underride Guard Fails
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is also pushing for improved underride bars and is petitioning the federal government to require stronger bars on more trucks. Some of the problems the IIHS has noted are that the bars are not required on all trucks and when they are present on exempt trucks and trailers, they don’t meet the 1996 rules for strength or energy absorption. Another problem is that “Under current certification standards, the trailer, underride guard, bolts, and welding don’t have to be tested as a whole system.”
The IIHS contends that underride bar technology has not kept pace with vehicle crashworthiness. This recent study from the IIHS examines how, why and at what speed these guards fail. The report shows that truck underride bars can fail in relatively low-speed crashes leading to deadly consequences for car occupants.
“Cars’ front-end structures are designed to manage a tremendous amount of crash energy in a way that minimizes injuries for their occupants,” says Adrian Lund, Institute president. “Hitting the back of a large truck is a game changer. You might be riding in a vehicle that earns top marks in frontal crash tests, but if the truck’s underride guard fails — or isn’t there at all — your chances of walking away from even a relatively low-speed crash aren’t good.
IIHC’s Lunc also noted, “”The aim [of the study] was to see if some underride guards perform better than others and to identify what crash speeds and configurations produce different types of failure… Damage to the cars in some of these tests was so devastating that it’s hard to watch the footage without wincing. If these had been real-world crashes there would be no survivors.”
The study featured 2010 Chevy Malibus (which received a Five-Star Safety rating from NHTSA and a “Top Safety Pick” from IIHS) being crashed into three different semi-trailers, one of which was certified only to U.S. standards and the other two to both U.S. standards and also to more stringent Canadian standards. Dummies were decapitated in three of the six crash tests. Trailers made by Wabash National Corp., based in Lafayette, Indiana, are engineered to exceed the Canadian requirements. Trailers made by Hyundai Translead Inc., designed to meet U.S. standards alone showed the most problems. A trailer made by Vanguard National Trailer Corp. in Monon, Indiana, was also tested. It performed better than the Hyundai trailer but not as well as the one from Wabash.
If trucking companies won’t do the right thing and improve these critical safety components on their own, hopefully NHTSA will take this study into consideration and make the U.S. regulations on underride bars more stringent.
Update [11:30 a.m. CDT]
View the IIHS truck underride guard video.
(c) Copyright 2011 Brett A. Emison
Brett Emison is currently a partner at Langdon & Emison, a firm dedicated to helping injured victims across the country from their primary office near Kansas City. Mainly focusing on catastrophic injury and death cases as well as complex mass tort and dangerous drug cases, Mr. Emison often deals with automotive defects, automobile crashes, railroad crossing accidents (train accidents), trucking accidents, dangerous and defective drugs, defective medical devices.
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