When semitrailer trucks and passenger vehicles collide, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says, mandatory under-ride guards on the sides of tractor-trailer rigs could save lives. The trucking industry, though, says a better solution would be to hasten the rollout of advanced safety technology.
This spring, the IIHS has been dramatizing its argument by crashing midsize cars at 35 miles an hour into the center of a 53-foot-long dry van trailer. It says these crash tests show that a well-built guard on the side of a semitrailer can prevent roof-peeling car wrecks that are often fatal.
“Our tests and research show that side under-ride guards have the potential to save lives,” said David Zuby, the Institute’s executive vice president and chief research officer, in a press release. “We think a mandate for side under-ride guards on large trucks has merit, especially as crash deaths continue to rise on our roads.”
Federal law requires large trucks to have rear under-ride guards, but side guards are not mandated nationwide. Some cities, including Boston, New York, and Seattle, require side guards on city-owned and -contracted trucks.
The IIHS—funded by the auto insurance industry—and its research arm, the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), have been studying under-ride crashes for decades and have been crash-testing and rating rear under-ride guard protection on trailers from the biggest manufacturers since 2011. The tests this spring, though, marked the first time that IIHS had evaluated under-ride protection for side collisions.
One test included a side guard called an AngelWing from a company called AirFlow Deflector, which was featuring IIHS’s test results prominently on its website this week. An IIHS spokesman said the group does not have a business relationship with Airflow Deflector. The Institute said it tested AngelWing because it’s the only product it is aware of that trucking companies can buy that offers this protection.
In another IIHS test, the trailer had a fiberglass side skirt that is designed only to improve a truck’s aerodynamics, not to prevent a car from sliding beneath the trailer. Results with that device were “dramatically different,” the IIHS said. As seen in the image at the top of this story, part of the car’s roof was sheared off, and its occupants likely would have suffered fatal injuries, the group said.
Only the AngelWing guard prevented a midsize car from going underneath the trailer (photo below). That under-ride guard also allowed the car’s airbags and seatbelt to properly restrain the test dummy in the driver’s seat. Its maker says the guard also has fuel-saving aerodynamic benefits that help offset the cost.
IIHS began testing under-ride crashes in 2011, but this spring’s tests marked the first time it evaluated a side under-ride guard.
This type of crash, with a car hitting the side of a trailer, was at the heart of a high-profile accident involving Tesla’s Autopilot semi-autonomous driving system. Ohio native Joshua D. Brown was killed when his 2015 Model S, in self-driving Autopilot mode, failed to activate its automatic emergency braking system and ran into and under the side of a tractor-trailer rig. Tesla said afterward that the Autopilot system failed to recognize the white side of the truck against a background of bright sunlight.
There were 1542 deaths from crashes involving both passenger cars and tractor-trailers in 2015, according to the most recent federal data as analyzed by the IIHS. Of those, 301 fatalities involved a vehicle hitting the side of the trailer, which was down slightly from 308 in 2014. There were 35,022 traffic deaths in total that same year.
The American Trucking Associations (ATA), a group representing the trucking industry, said in an emailed statement that focusing on crash prevention, not adding side guards to tractor-trailers, is the best course for preventing under-ride deaths.
“Side under-ride crash protection has several complicating factors—engineering tradeoffs involving weight, strength, and effectiveness—that have prevented a consensus around adopting side under-ride guards,” the ATA statement read.
The group said side under-ride guards “would add significant weight and require stiffer trailers” that can develop cracks and wear out sooner, causing other safety issues. It said a wider deployment of advanced safety technologies, such as automated emergency braking and forward-collision-warning systems, would be their pick to help prevent under-ride crashes.
Rear under-ride guards, essentially strong bars, are required on most tractor-trailers. They are sometimes referred to as Mansfield bars because of their supposed connection to Hollywood starlet Jayne Mansfield. Mansfield was killed near New Orleans in June 1967 when her 1966 Buick Electra 225 crashed into the back of a tractor-trailer, killing her and two other front-seat passengers. Three children in the back seat escaped with minor injuries.
But like other lore surrounding Mansfield’s untimely death, it’s not completely true: Today’s Mansfield bar was not a direct result of the fatal wreck. Requirements for under-ride guards on medium and heavy trucks were first issued in 1953, long before the accident that killed the actress. NHTSA’s regulatory predecessor called for an updated standard in 1967, but it was not until 1998 that the federal standard that applies to semi-trailers was updated and strengthened.
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