Recognizing good rear underride protection
Nine North American trailer manufacturers, including the eight largest, have earned our Toughguard award for good rear underride protection on some or all of their trailers.
Rear underride guards are steel bars that hang from the backs of large trucks to prevent a passenger vehicle from moving underneath in a rear crash. Crashes with underride typically involve severe damage to the occupant compartment of the smaller vehicle, often with deadly results.
In 2011, IIHS released the first results of crash tests that showed that the performance of many current underride guards was lacking, particularly in offset crashes. We continued testing and encouraging improvements, and in 2017 we introduced the Toughguard award for trailers that pass all three of our tests, meaning there is no underride in any of the crashes.
In each of the tests, a midsize car traveling 35 mph is crashed into the back of a parked semitrailer. The three test configurations are:
Full width
The car crashes into the center of the truck's rear.
50% overlap
Half of the car's width overlaps the rear of the truck.
30% overlap
Thirty percent of the car's width overlaps the rear of the truck.
Award winners
- Great Dane
Applies to all dry van, refrigerated and platform units built after December 2018, in addition to earlier units equipped with the RIG30 option. - Hyundai Translead
Applies to all dry van and refrigerated units built after December 2017 and earlier units equipped with the RIG30 option. - Kentucky Trailer
Applies to all dry vans units with the KT30-RIG option built after February 2020. - Manac
Applies to all 90,000 series dry van, refrigerated and open top units built after June 2011. - Stoughton
Applies to all dry van units built after October 2016. - Strick
Applies to all long dry van models built after December 2018 and short, single-axle vans built after March 2019. - Utility
Applies to all dry van, refrigerated and flatbed units built after December 2019. Also applies to dry van and refrigerated units built before January 2020 and equipped with the additional auxiliary vertical bumper option. - Vanguard
Applies to all dry van units built after December 2015 and all refrigerated units built after September 2016. - Wabash
Applies to dry van units with the RIG-16 option built after February 2016.
Applies to refrigerated units with the RIG-16 option built after December 2016.
Test protocols
Semitrailer underride test protocol
Semitrailer rear impact guard quasi-static test protocol