Tag: underride

GAO Concludes Underride is Underreported, Duh

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The General Accounting Office added some weight to the arguments safety advocates have been making for decades about the need for the government to more vigorously tackle the truck underride problem. This week, the GAO released the results of a study to support the consideration of the STOP Underrides Act (S. 666 / H.R. 1511), which would, among other things, require the trucking industry increase its installation of these protective guards. The title, Truck Underride Guards- Improved Data Collection, Inspections, and Research Needed, summed up the report’s central conclusions.

Underride activists Marianne Karth and Lois Durso were less than impressed. These recommendations, they said, can be tossed on a stack of similar suggestions made by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) going back as far as 1992.

“The report basically sums up everything we’ve been telling Congress for the last few years,” says Karth, who took up the cause of requiring trucks to be outfitted with effective underride guards after a May 2013 underride crash that killed two of her nine children, 17-year-old AnnaLeah and 13-year-old Mary. Karth’s vehicle was propelled under the rear of a tractor trailer by another semi trying to switch lanes. “It’s too easy for those who don’t want to be in the position of taking action on the bill to say ‘Oh, we need more data,’ and use it for an excuse for further inaction. Yes, they made some good recommendations, but these are things we already knew and NHTSA already knew, and there are no timelines, no teeth in it, nothing to hold them accountable.”

From January 2018 to March 2019, the GAO reviewed the literature and interviewed a wide range of stakeholders, including representatives of the trucking industry, underride guard developers, law enforcement officials, and transportation safety officials from the European Union, Canada, NHTSA, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the NTSB and the IIHS.

U.S. Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) Chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, along with colleagues Richard Burr (R-NC); Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Marco Rubio (R-FL) and John Thune (R-SD) asked for the assessment to provide context for the STOP Underrides Act, originally introduced in December 2017 and re-introduced last month. The legislation, sponsored by Gillibrand, Rubio and Congressman Stephen Cohen (D-TN) would require the Department of Transportation to issue a final rule to require an upgrade to the rear underride standard and add a requirement for front and side underride guards that meet a performance standard on all trailers, semi-trailers, and single unit trucks with a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 10,000 pounds. The bill also includes retrofit provisions and maintenance requirements, and compels the DOT to finish its research on front underride guard for commercial trucks.

Much of the report concentrated on the lack of accurate data. The GAO analyzed underride crash data and fatalities from 2008 through 2017, finding in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) figures a range, per year, of 189 to 253 truck underride fatalities, an annual average of about 219 fatalities – less than one percent of total annual death toll and 5.5 percent of all fatalities related to large truck crashes during this time frame. At the same time, the report acknowledged that underride crashes are among those types of crashes that have the most severe consequences for passenger vehicle occupants, because of the intrusion. It also recognized that the fatality figures are a likely under-count, because there is no uniform collection of underride data among the nation’s different crash reporters, especially police departments, which may not have a place on their accident reporting forms to note an underride crash. Researchers at the IIHS and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) told the GAO that even the FARS data missed underride crashes.

The report explored the advances in underride guard technology and systems that make it possible for trucks to reduce their incompatibility with passenger vehicles. It documented the development of crashworthy side underride guards, including one IIHS-crash-tested aftermarket manufacturer of side underride guards, which has sold about 100 sets of side underride guards, at about $2,500 per trailer. Additionally, some trailer manufacturers reported that they were in the process of developing side underride guards.

The GAO also noted that a 2015 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to align the two U.S. underride standards, FMVSS 223 and FMVSS 224 with the 2007 Canadian standard for rear impact guards, has not yet been completed. (See NHTSA Proposes to Affirm Canadian Underride Standard)  This would be the first major upgrade to the rear impact protection standards for trucks in 21 years, and would merely codify what 95 percent of the industry is already doing. In 2014, Marianne and Jerry Karth, and the Truck Safety Coalition petitioned the Secretary of Transportation to raise the minimum level of insurance for truck drivers, for a final rule on electronic logging devices to reduce truck driver fatigue; and to improve the rear underride guard rules. NHTSA granted the Karth petition in July 2014 and a year later, the agency published an ANPRM to consider conspicuity and rear impact guard standards for single unit trucks. In October, NHTSA withdrew the ANPRM, saying that based on its analysis of the costs, it could not justify taking further action.

The GAO also examined the FMCSA regulatory role in ensuring that the rear impact guards currently required were actually safe, by requiring annual inspections. The current rules do not specifically include an inspection of the rear guard, even though trucking industry representatives told  the GAO that the guard may be damaged during normal use, such as  backing into loading docks, but would escape notice unless pulled out for a random road inspection: “Stakeholders we interviewed told us that a trailer could go its entire lifecycle—estimated as typically 10 to 15 years—without ever being selected for a roadside inspection,” the report said. 

GAO made several recommendations. First, it suggested that the NHTSA Administrator improve data collection by recommending that the expert panel of the Model Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria update it to standardize the definition of underride crashes and to include underride as a recommended data field. The Model Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria, developed in 1998, identifies motor vehicle crash data elements and their definitions that states should consider collecting. The report also recommended that NHTSA educate state and local police departments on the identification and documentation of underride crashes. The GAO recommended that the FMCSA chief revise regulations to require the inspection of rear guards during commercial vehicles’ annual inspections. Finally, it recommended that NHTSA further research on side underride guards to better understand the overall effectiveness and cost associated with these guards and, if warranted, develop standards for their implementation.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association reacted to the report by commenting that the data did not support taking any further action to prevent underrides. Durso says the message is actually the opposite.

“We’ve heard this same litany of excuses for 10, 20 years. We know that underride fatalities are grossly under-counted,” said Durso, who lost her 26-year old daughter Roya Sadigh in a side underride crash in Indiana on November 26, 2004.  “And when you do a cost-benefit analysis based on underreported numbers, the results are skewed.” Nonetheless, she added, “we think 2-300 people dying is enough to do something about it. We know you can’t prevent crashes, but you can prevent the fatality with underride protection and that’s what the main point of the bill. Everything in the GAO report is already addressed in STOP Underrides Act.”

The report follows a crash-test demonstration in Washington D.C. less than three weeks ago hosted by Karth and Durso to demonstrate the efficacy of side underride guards. The tests used Chevy Malibus as the bullet car, striking the side of a tractor trailer at about 30 mph, with and without side underride guards. Industry representatives, and staff members from the Department of Transportation, the Senate commerce committee, and the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee watched as the side underride guards engaged the Malibu, crushing the front end, but leaving the windshield and roof intact.

Karth says that their experiences as underride activists taught them that the inertia was due to “the total lack of collaboration and communication between industry, government, engineers, and safety advocates,” she said in a long email. “It really bothered me that that situation stood in the way of effective progress in solving the underride problem. Out of that birthed the idea of holding an Underride Roundtable and we proceeded to spearhead organizing two of them. At first I tried to get NHTSA to host it but they said that they could not but would attend and encouraged me to go ahead with plans to do so. The Roundtables were beneficial and brought people together to talk and listen and observe. And it contributed to putting public pressure on the trailer manufacturers to step up to the plate. But it didn’t lead to any action on NHTSA’s part (although they had people present at the events). Because IIHS was gracious to host them, we were able to have crash tests as part of both Roundtables. Who can argue with the evidence before your very eyes? But what I learned was that no one could hold NHTSA accountable. They were not transparent. They did not foster collaborative discussions or actions.”

Karth says that one of the most important lessons of working on the bill was the need to overcome the obstacle created by the lack of transparency and communication. The activists are promoting the creation of a Committee on Underride Protection, with a representative from every stakeholder group participating to foster effective communication and engineering and logistical problem-solving.

“We are at a fork in the road, a decision point,” Karth added. “This GAO report confirms what we already know and yet we are continuing to let people die, when we know we could do something about it. Congress, the ball is in your court.”

Underride Activists Campaign with Crash Tests

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If you can’t get a member of Congress to the crash test site, bring it to them – at least that was the thinking of underride activists Marianne Karth and Lois Durso, in hosting three tests yesterday to demonstrate the efficacy of underride guards.

The tests, held in a parking lot near Audi Field, two miles from the U.S. Capital in Washington D.C., used Chevy Malibus as the bullet car, striking the side of a tractor trailer at about 30 mph – one test using a trailer equipped with an AngelWing type side underride guard, one with a different side guard design and one without. Industry representatives, and staff members from the Department of Transportation, the Senate commerce committee, and the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee looked on as the underride guards in the first two tests engaged and crushed the front end of the vehicle, which bore the brunt of the crash force, leaving the windshield and roof untouched.

Video: WUSA9 and MGA

“The results were pretty dramatic,” says Durso, who lost her 26-year old daughter Roya Sadigh in a side underride crash in Indiana on November 26, 2004. “In the crash without the underride guard, the entire top half of the car peeled off from the windshield back. The thing about these crashes is, if you think about what [movie star] Jayne Mansfield’s car looked like, today’s cars look just like that after an underride crash. Cars have gotten safer, but underride crashes are just as deadly as they were in the 1960s.”

(Mansfield died on in a horrific underride crash in Louisiana in June 1969.)

Each year, some 4,000 people die in crashes with large trucks. From 1994-2014 more than 5,000 people died in underride crashes, and the official underride death toll estimate is 200 motorists annually. But these figures are likely under-counts, because police, and other crash data collectors often do not characterize truck-car crashes as such. For example, the crashes involving Karth and Durso’s children were not classified as underride incidents.  

But Durso and Karth know that whatever the number is, it could be lower. They hoped that the demonstration would make the point that there are ready solutions to the hazard, and would push forward legislation that would, in turn, push forward an underride rulemaking that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration undertook in 2015. 

Karth became an activist for truck underride safety after a May 2013 underride crash that killed two of her nine children, 17-year-old Annaleah and 13-year-old Mary. Karth was on a Georgia highway approaching slowed traffic, when a semi trying to switch lanes hit the Karth vehicle in the rear, sending it underneath another tractor trailer. Yesterday, Karth said that she last met with NHTSA in the late fall, but has no idea if or when the agency will advance the rulemaking.

“That’s why we drafted the legislation,” she said after the tests. “We wanted to have something [Congress] could see and hear, something that would stick in their minds, and they wouldn’t be able to sleep until they did something about it.”

The STOP Underrides Act, first introduced in 2017, by Senator Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Congressman Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA) would require the Department of Transportation to issue a final rule to require an upgrade to the rear underride standard and add a requirement for front and side underride guards that meet a performance standard on all trailers, semi-trailers, and single unit trucks with a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 10,000 pounds.  The bill also includes retrofit provisions and maintenance requirements, and compels the DOT to finish its research on front underride guard for commercial trucks.

In 2014, Marianne and Jerry Karth, and the Truck Safety Coalition petitioned the Secretary of Transportation to raise the minimum level of insurance for truck drivers, for a final rule on electronic logging devices to reduce truck driver fatigue; and to improve the rear underride guard rules. NHTSA granted the Karth petition in July 2014 and a year later, the agency published an ANPRM to consider conspicuity and rear impact guard standards for single unit trucks.

In December 2015, the agency initiated a separate Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to align the two U.S. standards, FMVSS 223 and FMVSS 224 with the 2007 Canadian standard for rear impact guards. This was the first major upgrade to the rear impact protection standards for trucks in 21 years, long enough for the new rule to do little to upset the trucking industry: NHTSA estimated that “93 percent of new trailers sold in the U.S. subject to FMVSS Nos. 223 and 224 are already designed to comply with CMVSS No. 223.”

The proposed upgrade would mandate that rear impact guards meet new strength requirements at specified test locations. Specifically, the current quasi-static point load test at the area around the guard’s vertical support location would be replaced by a uniform distributed load test of 350,000 Newtons (N). The performance standards would require the rear impact guard to resist the 350,000 N load without deflecting more than 125 mm, absorb at least 20,000 Joules of energy within 125 mm of guard deflection. The proposal would also require that any portion of the guard and the guard attachments not completely separate from its mounting structure after completing the test.

NHTSA did not lower the guard height from the current 22 inches, nor did it extend the standard’s applicability to currently excluded classes of truck configurations, such as wheels back trailers, pole trailers, logging trailers, low chassis trailers and specialty equipment trucks.

In the three years hence, the NPRM to codify what the trucking industry is already doing has languished. Last October, NHTSA withdrew the ANPRM for better conspicuity and underride guards on single-unit truck, saying that based on its analysis of the costs, it could not justify taking further action. The STOP Underrides Act sits in committee in both chambers. Durso and Karth are currently lobbying the respective committee chairs for their support.

“In 50 years, nothing has happened and people keep dying,” Durso says. “Fourteen years ago, I suffered this unimaginable loss and 14 years later, I’m still at it. We know the technology is available.”

NHTSA Proposes to Affirm Canadian Underride Standard

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Q: When’s the best time to pass a rule? A: When nearly everyone already complies! While it puts you at the trailing edge of safety, it diminishes the intensity of the opposition – so it’s all good. Such is the state of a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposal to upgrade the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards 223 and 224, for rear impact guard and rear impact protection, respectively.

The agency is proposing to align the two U.S. standards with the eight-year-old Canadian standard for rear impact guards. The proposal represents the first major upgrade to the rear impact protection standards for trucks in 21 years. It has been so long since NHTSA has addressed the current standards’ weaknesses, that an estimated “93 percent of new trailers sold in the U.S. subject to FMVSS Nos. 223 and 224 are already designed to comply with CMVSS No. 223.”

The proposed upgrade would mandate that rear impact guards meet new strength requirements at several test locations. Specifically, the current quasi-static point load test at the area around the guard’s vertical support location would be replaced by a uniform distributed load test of 350,000 Newtons (N). The performance requirements would mandate the rear impact guard to resist the 350,000 N load without deflecting more than 125 mm, and absorb at least 20,000 Joules of energy within 125 mm of guard deflection. The proposal would also require that any portion of the guard and the guard attachments not completely separate from its mounting structure after completing the test.

What NHTSA did not do: lower the guard height from the current 22 inches, nor extend the standard’s applicability to currently excluded classes of truck configurations, such as wheels back trailers, pole trailers, logging trailers, low chassis trailers and specialty equipment trucks.

Russ Rader, of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which has been pushing for better rear impact guards for nearly 40 years, and formally petitioned the agency in 2011 for an upgrade, said the proposal is “a good first step, because the Canadian standard is an improvement.”

“But our tests show that they could have gone a lot further,” he added. “The Canadian standard misses protection in some offset crashes, and we know that truck manufacturers can address that in a straightforward, inexpensive way and it’s not addressed in this proposal.”

A Brief Regulatory History

Rear guard protection has been a federal requirement since 1952, when the Bureau of Motor Carriers of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) established regulation 393.86 which required heavy trucks, trailers, and semitrailers to be equipped with a rear-end protection device designed to help prevent underride. The regulation contained no specifics as to the device’s efficacy, but merely required the guard to be “substantially constructed and firmly attached.”

In 1967, the Federal Highway Administration, the precursor to NHTSA, attempted to begin a rulemaking to require a rear underride guard for trucks, buses and trailers, but industry fought off any substantive upgrade to the regulations for 44 years. In 1981, the agency published an NPRM amending the equipment requirement to a moderate strength guard that would permanently deform when subjected to a load of 45,000 pounds. The agency also proposed to extend the standard to most trucks and trailers with GVWR of more than 10,000 pounds, which would include heavy single-unit trucks. In the proposed rule, the rear impact guard could not have a ground clearance greater than 21.65 inches (55 cm). The trucking industry also heavily criticized this proposal, submitting more than 100 comments. In 1992, the agency responded by proposing to split the standard in two: one for the rear guard itself, and a separate standard for the vehicle.

In 1996, NHTSA published a final rule establishing two Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) – 223, Rear Impact Guards, and 224, Rear Impact Protection. FMVSS 223, the equipment standard, specified strength requirements and compliance procedures for rear impact guards on semitrailers. FMVSS 224, the vehicle standard, specified mounting instructions and location specifications for those guards. The final rule retained the prosed 22" guard height.  Single unit trucks were excluded from the requirements, because, the agency said, single unit trucks are far less likely to be involved in fatal accidents than combination trucks.

In 1998, the agency responded to some petitions for reconsideration and amended the Final Rule  

In the meantime, research by John E. Tomassoni, a former NHTSA safety standards engineer demonstrated the inadequacy of the U.S. rules in a series of crash tests involving rear underride guards built to reflect the then-new rear impact protection standard. The work showed that underride guards that minimally complied with the new rule were effective at impact speeds of 30 mph. But in some of the tests, the underride magnitude was such that passenger compartment intrusion occurred – in some instances, the dummy head contacted the deformed occupant compartment. And, in 2002, Transport Canada conducted a series of tests using a 1998 Ford Windstar, a 1998 Chevrolet Cavalier, and a 1998 Honda Civic,  to verify the performance of rear impact guards built under FMVSS 223/224.  It found that “none of the minimally compliant guards were effective for all three vehicle types tested.” Transport Canada effectively upgraded its standard in 2007.

The IIHS petitioned the agency in 2011. In May 2014, Marianne Karth and the Truck Safety Coalition also petitioned NHTSA to require underride guards on single unit trucks and other vehicles excluded from the current standard and to improve the standards’ requirements for all guards. NHTSA granted both petitions in July 2014, saying that it would pursue rulemaking through an ANPRM pertaining to rear impact guards for single-unit trucks and “other safety strategies not currently required for those vehicles” and a separate NPRM to upgrade FMVSS Nos. 223 and 224.

In July 2015, the agency published the advanced notice of proposed rulemaking regarding underride protection for single unit trucks.

IIHS and Karth Petitions

The IIHS has been researching various aspects of the issue, from determining the scope of the problem to developing a new underride guard. In 1977, it launched a program to develop a lightweight and effective guard that might serve as a prototype. Researchers designed and tested two guards and concluded that it was feasible to achieve substantial improvements in underride protection without significant increases in the weight of underride protection devices.

IIHS also performed a series of crash tests to determine which underride guards perform better than others and under various crash speeds and configurations (head-on and off-set) and to determine what types of failures occurred.  Testing was done using the Chevy Malibu into trailers that were certified to Canadian and U.S. requirements.  In general the testing found that the Canadian guards performed significantly better, and that there are fundamental weaknesses in the guard attachments which don’t have to be tested as a whole system. 

In 2011, the IIHS petitioned the agency to upgrade the rear impact protection standards because “the current standards allow underride guard designs that fail catastrophically when struck by passenger vehicles at speeds that frequently produce minimal intrusion and injury risk in regulatory and consumer information frontal crash test programs.”

In support, the Institute used the Large Truck Crash Causation Study, a federal database of roughly 1,000 real-world crashes in 2001-03.  The organization examined crash patterns leading to rear underride of heavy trucks and semi-trailers with and without guards and found that underride was a common outcome of the 115 crashes involving a passenger vehicle striking the back of a heavy truck or semi-trailer. Only 22 percent of the crashes didn’t involve underride or had only negligible underride, which they indicated was consistent with prior studies. The study noted that “In 23 of the 28 cases in which someone in the passenger vehicle died, there was severe or catastrophic underride damage, meaning the entire front end or more of the vehicle slid beneath the truck.”

IIHS also pointed to the regulatory gaps that allow some heavy trucks to forgo guards altogether and if they are on trucks exempt from the regulations, the guards don’t have to meet 1996 rules for strength or energy absorption.

In its petition, the IIHS asked NHTSA to consider: substantially increasing the quasi-static force requirements, move the one of the test locations farther outboard to address offset crash protection; require that attachment hardware remains intact throughout the tests; require guards be certified while attached to the trailers for which they are designed; investigate whether the maximum guard ground clearance can be reduced; and reduce the number of exempt truck and trailer types.

Marianne Karth became an activist for truck underride safety after a horrific underride crash that killed two of her nine children. In May 2013, Karth was on a Georgia highway approaching slowed traffic, when a semi trying to switch lanes hit the Karth vehicle in the rear, sending it underneath another tractor trailer.  Karth’s 17-year-old and 13-year-old daughters died in the crash.  One year later, Karth and the Truck Safety Coalition presented NHTSA with its petition and 11,000 signatories acquired online. Their petition asked for the Secretary of Transportation to raise the minimum level of insurance for truck drivers, for a final rule on electronic logging devices to reduce truck driver fatigue; and to improve the rear underride guard rules.

In July 2014, NHTSA granted the Karth petition without mentioning the IIHS at all. In July 2015, the agency published the separate ANPRM to consider conspicuity and rear impact guard standards for single unit trucks.

The Proposed Rule

According the NPRM, NHTSA’s interest in improving this rulemaking goes back to 2009 when the agency evaluated a study showing that fatalities were still occurring in frontal crashes “despite high rates of seat belt use and the presence of air bags and other advanced safety features.”  NHTSA’s review of cases in model year 2000 or newer vehicles in the Crashworthiness Data System of the National Automotive Sampling System found 14 percent were underrides into single unit trucks and trailers.  In 2010, NHTSA published another study analyzing the effectiveness of trailer rear impact guards, which showed what Tomassoni demonstrated more than a decade earlier: FMVSS 223 and 224 rear impact guard had had no impact on fatality rates.  

Now that the agency’s interest has been translated into action, it is only inclined to increase the force and energy absorption requirements without lowering the guard height or bringing other types of trucks into the standard. In the former case, NHTSA said that the issue was discussed extensively in 1996. Public comments, vehicle geometry, heavy vehicle operations, and crash test data led the agency to conclude that it would present an undue burden to industry. Apparently, it now is not the burden it was, because NHTSA now declines to decrease the guard height because “fleet data suggest that where possible, trailer manufacturers are voluntarily installing rear impact guards with ground clearances under 560 mm (22 inches).”

On the issue of extending the standard to other types of trucks, the agency said that its analysis showed that there are relatively few fatal rear-impact crashes involving the current excluded categories, such as wheels back trucks, and of those that do occur, many are at speeds that are not survivable – with or without an underride guard

Rader says that the Institute will continue its work on better rear impact guards, despite the gaps in the NPRM.

 “From our standpoint, we know that the trailer manufacturers will need to deal with offset crashes,” he said. “We plan to continue testing – we want to work with trailer manufacturers to go beyond the Canadian standards. We’ve gotten tremendous cooperation, and we are working with Marianne Karth to set up an underride round table to discuss further steps.”  

NHTSA Finally Tackles Rear Underride

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One Ms. Marianne Karth of the Truck Safety Coalition and 11,000 signatories have succeeded where the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety – with all its fancy-pants testing – and the Canadians – with their much tougher standard – had failed, persuading the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to initiate a rulemaking to upgrade the rear underride standard.

Earlier this month, the agency published a notice in the Federal Register announcing that it would issue two separate notices – an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on rear impact

guards and other safety strategies for single-unit trucks, and an NPRM on rear impact guards on trailers and semitrailers. Apparently, it was a May 5 meeting between the Coalition and Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx that turned the tide. The advocacy group presented their signatures and made the case that amendments to FMVSS No. 223, Rear Impact Guards, and FMVSS No. 224, Rear Impact Protection were long overdue.

IIHS got the typical cold shoulder NHTSA presents to outside suggestions. The announcement made no mention of the 2011 petition the IIHS submitted to “require stronger underride guards that will remain in place during a crash and to mandate guards for more large trucks and trailers.”  Spokesman Russ Rader says that the agency neither denied it, nor issued any official response.

“They told us they were working on it,” he says. “We’re glad that NHTSA is working to move forward in taking this first step.”

Three years ago, the IIHS didn’t gather signatures, but it did present lots of data to the data-driven agency. The Institute examined crash patterns leading to rear underride of heavy trucks and semi-trailers with and without guards, using the Large Truck Crash Causation Study, a federal database of roughly 1,000 real-world crashes in 2001-03.  It found that underride was a common outcome of the 115 crashes involving a passenger vehicle striking the back of a heavy truck or semi-trailer. Only 22 percent of the crashes didn’t involve underride or had only negligible underride, which they indicated was consistent with prior studies.  The study noted that “In 23 of the 28 cases in which someone in the passenger vehicle died, there was severe or catastrophic underride damage, meaning the entire front end or more of the vehicle slid beneath the truck.”

IIHS also performed a series of crash tests to assess the efficacy of various underride guards under different crash speeds and configurations (head-on and off-set) to determine what types of failures occurred.  The IIHS used the Chevy Malibu, a sedan with a high crash-test rating, as the bullet vehicle and trailers that were certified to Canadian and U.S. requirements as the targets.  Canadian requirements, required since 2007, are more stringent than the U.S. for strength and energy absorption.  In general the testing found significant performance differences between U.S. and Canadian guards – the Canadian guards performed significantly better.  The testing also revealed fundamental weaknesses in the attachments which don’t have to be tested as a whole system. 

In addition, IIHS pointed out that there were significant regulatory gaps allowing some heavy trucks to forgo guards altogether and if they are on trucks exempt from the regulations, the guards don’t have to meet 1996 rules for strength or energy absorption.

That petition followed a NHTSA November 2010 study showing that the guards were not very effective in preventing fatalities or serious injuries from rear impacts to tractor trailers. The study, conducted as part of the agency’s evaluation of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards 223 and 224, used state crash data from Florida and North Carolina, showing a slight – not statistically significant – decrease in fatalities and serious injuries to occupants in a rear-impact crash with a tractor trailer. The agency noted, however, that the sample size might have been too small.

Rear guard protection has been a federal requirement since 1952, when the Bureau of Motor Carriers of the Interstate Commerce Commission required heavy trucks, trailers, and semitrailers to be equipped with a rear-end protection device designed to help prevent underride. The regulation contained no specifics as to the device’s efficacy, but merely required the guard to be “substantially constructed and firmly attached.”  In 1967, the Federal Highway Administration, attempted to begin a rulemaking to require a rear underride guard for trucks, buses and trailers, but industry fought off any substantive upgrade to the regulations for 44 years. In 1996, NHTSA published a final rule establishing two Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) – 223, Rear Impact Guards, and 224, Rear Impact Protection. FMVSS 223, the equipment standard, specified strength requirements and compliance procedures for rear impact guards on semitrailers. FMVSS 224, the vehicle standard, specified mounting instructions and location specifications for those guards.

The agency has done little to improve the rule since.

The IIHS, which has been advocating for a better rear underride standard for decades, has launched a series of research projects that have ranged from determining the scope of the problem to developing a new underride guard. Last March, the Institute published the results of its latest round of testing

The IIHS has continued its research into effective underride prevention. In 2013, the Institute published the results of further testing it performed –also using a 2010 Malibu as the bullet vehicle, striking a parked truck at 35 mph in three overlap modes: 100 percent, 50 percent and 30 percent.

All eight guards successfully prevented underride, including one from Hyundai Translead, whose earlier model failed a full-width test by IIHS. In the second test, in which only half the width of the car overlapped with the trailer, all but one trailer passed. However, when the overlap was reduced to 30 percent, every trailer except one from the Canadian manufacturer Manac failed. Manac sells dry van trailers in the U.S. under the name Trailmobile. The Institute uses a 30 percent overlap for the most challenging underride test because it is the minimum overlap under which a passenger vehicle occupant's head is likely to strike a trailer if an underride guard fails.

 

“We’ve been told that five of the major trailer manufacturers have upgrades in the works that they are doing voluntarily, and we are hoping to test those upgrades as soon as they are available late this year or early next year,” Rader says. “Manufacturers have indicated the changes they made were not expensive and did not add a substantial amount of weight. It’s not a difficult task to make guards tougher.”