Kentucky Trailer Earns Safety Award for Underride Guards

March 23, 2020—Kentucky Trailer earned the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s TOUGHGUARD award for effective rear underride prevention.

Underride occurs when a passenger vehicle slides under a larger vehicle during a crash. This typically causes severe intrusion into the passenger vehicle’s occupant space and is often deadly. Rear underride guards are metal bumpers that hang from the backs of semitrailers to prevent underride in a rear impact.

The TOUGHGUARD criteria consist of three tests — full-width, 50 percent overlap and 30 percent overlap. In each configuration, a typical midsize car travels at 35 mph toward the back of a parked semitrailer.

In the full-width test, the car strikes the center of the guard head-on. In the 50 percent overlap, half of the car's front end strikes the guard. In the 30 percent overlap, the toughest evaluation, 30 percent of the car's front strikes the corner of the trailer.