Underride Truck Accident Claims

An underride crash happens when a passenger vehicle slides beneath a truck's trailer.

The trailer shears into the car at windshield height, and the people inside take the worst of it.

These are the crashes that turn a survivable collision into a fatal one.

And they are very often preventable, because the guard meant to stop them was missing, rusted, or too weak to hold.

When an underride guard fails, the trailer's owner or its maker can be liable for what that failure cost you.

An underride case is built by proving the guard, the maintenance, and the visibility that should have stopped the crash.

Call (888) 713-6653 for a free case review. You pay nothing unless we win.

A truck trailer rides high off the ground, with a gap beneath it tall enough for a car to slide into. An underride crash is when that happens: a passenger vehicle goes under the trailer instead of bouncing off it.

There are two main kinds. A rear underride happens when a car runs into the back of a trailer, often a truck stopped or slowing on the highway. A side underride happens when a car strikes the long side of a trailer, frequently when a truck makes a slow or ill-timed turn across traffic. In both, the trailer enters the passenger compartment at the level of the occupants' heads and chests, which is why underride crashes produce catastrophic head and neck injuries and a high rate of death even at moderate speeds.

The single bar of steel meant to stop a rear underride is called a rear impact guard, and federal safety standards require trailers to have one that meets strength and dimension rules.^[1] When a guard is missing, corroded, bent from a prior impact, or built too weak, it fails to do the one job it exists for.

Two other failures show up again and again. Rust and neglect leave guards that snap on impact, which is a maintenance failure the carrier owns. And poor conspicuity, missing or filthy reflective tape that should make a trailer visible at night, contributes to the rear-end strikes that become underrides. Side underride is its own scandal: most trailers still carry no side guard at all, and that design gap is increasingly the subject of product-liability scrutiny.

Because an underride usually involves a guard that should have worked, liability often reaches past the driver:

The motor carrier for failing to maintain the guard, keep the reflective tape clean and intact, or take an unsafe trailer out of service.

The trailer or guard manufacturer for a guard that was too weak or a design with no side protection, a product-liability claim.

The driver and carrier for the underlying crash, a trailer stopped in a travel lane or a turn made across oncoming traffic.

Sorting out the carrier from the manufacturer, and preserving the trailer itself as evidence, is the heart of these cases. It follows the same liability map as our overview of who can be sued in a truck accident.

Your filing deadline is set by your state's statute of limitations, and for a death claim the rules can differ from an injury claim. The most urgent task is preserving the trailer and its guard before they are repaired, scrapped, or sent back into service, because the physical evidence is the case. A preservation demand has to go out immediately. Get your specific deadline confirmed for your state and your facts right away.