Truck Underride Injuries
If you have ever paid attention to a semi-truck going down the highway, at the back of it is a bar (below the doors that swing open) and this is called an underride bar. It has been mandated by the federal government as a safety feature because what was happening is that cars would collide with the back of a truck and end up going under the trailer, and the trailer would go through the windshield, causing serious injuries. The underride bar is a simple metal bar that is welded to the back of the trailer and helps prevent the trailer from intruding into the passenger compartment of cars.
Today’s modern cars are designed to have impact zones with other cars; they match up bumper to bumper which triggers safety features such as air bags which help protect the driver and passengers. Automobiles are not designed to run into something that’s sitting high off the ground, like the back of a semi-truck trailer – doing so can sometimes bypass a vehicles safety system. The underride bar is designed to prevent this from happening.
But what about the sides of the trailer? What about the front of the semi-truck? At Willis, Willis & Rizzi we have had cases where unfortunately people have died because their vehicle went under the side of the trailer or front of the truck where a simple underride bar would have prevented the fatal injury.
You would think this would be an easy solution: just add the underride bar to the sides of the trailer and front of the truck. Guess what? The rest of the world has it, but not the United States. In many countries around the world, it is mandated that trailers have a side underride bar, and even a front underride (where the bumper of the front of the truck is low enough to hit the impact zone of the car). When you look at this in the United States and we don’t have a side underride mandate, you must wonder why don’t we have this? The only thing that comes to mind is we have lobbying efforts that have kept the federal government from mandating that we have side underride bars.
At Willis, Willis and Rizzi our view is that injuries resulting from the lack of a side underride bar is a product liability case. It is a product defect because trailer manufacturers are putting out a product that is inferior to what is available in the rest of the world. In these types of cases where a truck pulls out in front of someone and a vehicle goes under the side of the trailer – you may have a claim against the trucking company and the driver for failure to obey traffic laws and causing the collision. But there also may be a product liability claim against the manufacturer of the trailer for putting this product out without a simple safety feature.
There are a lot of reasons why the lack of side underride bars leads to so many serious injuries and why it should be mandated in the United States. This is an area that is fertile for litigation because manufacturers have chosen to ignore adding this safety feature. What we see is rather than being forced to add a side underride bar by federal mandate, trailer manufacturers would rather pay the claims that occasionally come up by attorneys who are willing to prosecute.
If you or a loved one has sustained a serious injury in a truck collision, contact Willis, Willis & Rizzi today at 330-535-2000 or fill in the request form on this page to speak to a personal injury attorney who has the experience of litigating accidents involving semi-trailers and the lack of a side (or front) underride safety feature.
