A Billion-Dollar Fix for a Distraction Problem Disguised as an Underride Problem

A Billion-Dollar Fix for a Distraction Problem Disguised as an Underride Problem

Rob Carpenter

Mon, February 9, 2026 at 3:58 PM UTC

13 min read

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On Feb. 4, a bipartisan group of lawmakers reintroduced legislation that would require side underride guards on all newly manufactured semi-trailers in the United States, reigniting a decades-old safety debate that pits grieving families against an industry staring down what the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association has called “one of the costliest federal trucking mandates in history.”

The Stop Underrides Act 2.0, filed as H.R. 7354 in the House and S. 3775 in the Senate, was introduced by Representatives Steve Cohen (D-TN), Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA), and Deborah Ross (D-NC), along with Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM). It is cosponsored in the Senate by Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). The bill is supported by 18 organizations, including the Teamsters, the Truck Safety Coalition, the Center for Auto Safety, and Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.

The bill would direct the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to finalize rulemaking requiring side underride guards on commercial trucks, restart the Department of Transportation’s Advisory Committee on Underride Protection, fund new research through the National Academies of Sciences, instruct the Government Accountability Office to study the implementation of NHTSA’s 2022 rear underride rule, require NHTSA to correct misclassified underride crashes in its fatality database and create free training for law enforcement to better identify underride incidents at crash scenes.

It is the fourth time this legislation has been introduced. And to understand why it keeps coming back, and why it keeps dying, you have to understand the collision between emotional advocacy, federal math, and an industry that has been asked to bankroll a solution to a problem it largely didn’t create.

From Mansfield to Mandate

The story of underride protection in America begins with a dead actress and a Louisiana highway.

On June 29, 1967, Jayne Mansfield was riding in the front seat of a 1966 Buick Electra when the car rear-ended a tractor-trailer that had slowed behind a pesticide spray truck near Biloxi, Mississippi. The top of the Buick was sheared off. Mansfield, her driver, and her lawyer were killed instantly. Her three children, including future actress Mariska Hargitay, survived in the back seat. The crash became one of the most widely publicized traffic fatalities in American history, and it prompted the first federal conversation about what would eventually become rear underride guards, colloquially known to this day as “Mansfield bars.”

“Conversation” is the operative word. The NTSB introduced the first underride standards in 1953, requiring guards on vehicles with cargo beds 30 inches or more above the ground. Those early rules exempted most commercial vehicle types and were largely toothless. After Mansfield’s death, NHTSA proposed new requirements, but the trucking industry pushed back hard. The American Trucking Associations argued it was “fundamentally unfair to place all of the onus on the innocent party, the truck, to protect the driver of the impacting vehicle.” Sound familiar? It should. That was 1969.

A new rear guard mandate didn’t arrive until 1996, nearly 30 years later. By 1998, all new trailers were required to have rear underride guards meeting specific strength standards. Side guards? NHTSA concluded in 1991 that “combination truck side underride countermeasures have been determined not to be cost effective.” That determination stood for decades.

The modern legislative push began in 2013, when Marianne Karth survived a rear underride crash in Georgia that killed her two teenage daughters, 17-year-old AnnaLeah and 13-year-old Mary. Karth’s Crown Victoria had a rear underride guard on the truck it struck, but the guard failed. She and Lois Durso, whose 26-year-old daughter Roya Sadigh was killed in a side underride crash in Indiana in 2004, became the movement’s most visible advocates.

Together, they made 15 trips to Washington in a single year, paid out of pocket, and helped push the first Stop Underrides Act in December 2017. That bill, which sought front, rear, and side guards plus retrofit requirements for existing fleets, never received a vote. It was reintroduced in the 116th Congress (2019) and the 117th Congress (2021), but both times it died in committee. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included provisions directing NHTSA to research side underride guards, which led to a 2023 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. That ANPRM produced the cost-benefit analysis that would become the centerpiece of industry opposition.

The Math “Ain’t Mathing”

The bill’s sponsors cite “at least 300” underride deaths per year. The bill itself claims that since the formation of NHTSA more than 50 years ago, underride crashes have claimed 31,500 lives. Those numbers include combined rear, side, and front underride crashes, but this bill targets only side guards.

NHTSA’s own 2023 analysis estimates 89 light vehicle occupant fatalities and 409 serious injuries annually in two-vehicle crashes where a passenger vehicle strikes the side of a tractor-trailer and underrides it. After applying a 97 percent effectiveness rate for impacts at or below 40 mph, NHTSA projected that side guards would save 17.2 lives and prevent 69 serious injuries per year once all trailers in the fleet are equipped.

The cost? Between $970 million and $1.2 billion annually, including hardware, installation, and the lifetime fuel cost increase from adding 450 to 800 pounds to every trailer. The average installation cost per trailer: $2,990. The mandate would apply to roughly 260,000 new trailers manufactured each year. The resulting cost per equivalent life saved ranges from $73.5 million to $103.7 million.

NHTSA’s standard value of a statistical life is $11.9 million. This mandate would cost six to nine times that amount per life saved.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety disagrees sharply with NHTSA’s numbers. IIHS Senior Research Engineer Matthew Brumbelow projected that side guards could prevent 159 to 217 passenger vehicle occupant fatalities per year, more than 10 times NHTSA’s estimate, arguing the agency excluded relevant crash types, used speed limits rather than event data recorder speeds, and failed to account for pedestrian, cyclist, and motorcyclist deaths. Proponents also argue that NHTSA’s own crash database, FARS, systematically undercounts underride incidents. Marianne Karth herself discovered that the 2016 Tesla Autopilot side underride crash that killed Joshua Brown in Florida, perhaps the most famous underride crash in modern history, investigated by the NTSB itself, was coded as “no underride or override noted” in FARS data.

The 2.0 version of the bill attempts to address the data problem by instructing NHTSA to review FARS and correct misclassified underride crashes. It also requires the agency to develop law enforcement training on identifying underride incidents, a tacit admission that the data underpinning the cost-benefit analysis may be fundamentally unreliable.

Who Is Actually Causing These Crashes?

This reminds me of when we banned lawn darts because people simply lacked common sense not to throw sharp objects at each other. In the vast majority of side underride crashes, who is the striking vehicle, and what is the driver doing to not see this 53’ long trailer?

The answer, overwhelmingly, is the passenger vehicle and distraction.

A side underride crash, by definition, occurs when a car strikes the side of a trailer. The car is the bullet. The trailer is the wall. And while there are certainly scenarios where the truck driver bears fault, making an improper turn across traffic, failing to yield, crossing a divided highway, the physics of the crash type itself means that the passenger vehicle is the one making contact. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Large Truck Crash Causation Study found that in two-vehicle crashes between a large truck and a passenger vehicle, the passenger vehicle was assigned the “critical reason” 56 percent of the time. The truck was assigned the critical reason only 44 percent of the time.

Now layer distracted driving on top of that.

NHTSA reports that distracted driving killed 3,275 people in 2023 alone, accounting for 8 percent of all fatal crashes and an estimated 13 percent of all injury crashes. But even the agency acknowledges that distraction is “likely underreported because the behavior is difficult to detect during crash investigations.” A study cited by NHTSA estimated that distraction was actually involved in 29 percent of all crashes, resulting in more than 10,500 fatalities and $98.2 billion in economic costs in a single year. Among teen drivers, distraction was a factor in 58 percent of crashes. In commercial vehicles, 40 percent of truck crashes and 56 percent of motorcoach crashes involved potentially distracting behavior.

The Joshua Brown crash is the Rosetta Stone of this debate. On May 7, 2016, Brown was driving his Tesla Model S on Autopilot at 74 mph on U.S. Highway 27 in Williston, Florida, when a tractor-trailer hauling blueberries made a left turn across the divided highway. The Tesla passed entirely under the trailer, shearing off the roof. Brown was killed instantly. The truck driver alleged Brown was watching a Harry Potter movie. The NTSB found Brown was “overreliant” on the Autopilot system and had been disengaged from driving for an extended period. Neither Brown nor the Autopilot system applied the brakes or took any evasive action in the 10.4 seconds Brown had to respond.

Would a side underride guard have saved Joshua Brown? At 74 mph and a perpendicular angle, it’s debatable; the bill’s own standard is rated to 40 mph. But would paying attention to the road have saved him? Almost certainly.

A Question of Responsibility

This debate deserves honesty more than it deserves another talking point.

I believe deeply in the employer’s responsibility. If you run a trucking company, it is your obligation to put guardrails in place that control behaviors, mitigate risk, and protect your employees and the motoring public. Collision avoidance systems, stability control, proper maintenance, rigorous hiring, meaningful training, all of it. If a technology exists that makes my fleet safer, I want it. That is the duty of the employer.

There is a difference between an employer’s duty to manage risk and a government mandate that forces an entire industry to spend a billion dollars a year to protect the general public from its own behavior. One is personal responsibility. The other is community responsibility. And in a society that increasingly wants someone else to pay for the consequences of its own choices, that distinction matters.

The argument for side underride guards is essentially this: people will be distracted. People are going to drive into the sides of trucks, and because those impacts are so catastrophic, the truck needs to have armor to absorb the blow. It is the same logic that drives seatbelt mandates, airbag requirements, and guardrails on mountain roads. Society has decided that certain protections must exist because human fallibility is a given, not a variable.

I understand that argument. I respect the people making it, particularly the families who have lost children in these crashes. Marianne Karth and Lois Durso have done extraordinary work, and their pain is real. No one with a soul disputes that.

I also believe that it is not my job to babysit the motoring public. It is not my job to protect you from yourself. When NHTSA’s own numbers say this mandate would cost $73 to $104 million per life saved, six to nine times the agency’s own value of a statistical life, while the root cause of these crashes goes essentially unaddressed, we have to ask whether we are solving a problem or performing a ritual.

What the 2.0 Version Changes

Credit where it is due: this iteration of the bill is smarter than its predecessors.

The original Stop Underrides Act of 2017 sought to require front, rear, and side guards, with mandatory retrofits for existing fleets within two years. The industry, rightly, called that unworkable. A committee member representing truck drivers noted that the cost to retrofit some older trailers would exceed the trailers’ value, and many of those units are used primarily for storage.

The 2.0 version eliminates the retrofit requirement and focuses solely on new equipment. It mandates a 40 mph performance standard and, in a nod to the weight and fuel cost concerns that have dogged the issue, requires that side guards “contribute to fuel efficiency through the integration of aerodynamic design or components furthering fuel efficiency.” In other words, the guards must also function as side skirts, potentially offsetting some of the fuel penalty.

That is a meaningful concession, but the fundamental cost-benefit problem remains. Even with aerodynamic integration, the hardware, weight, and operational impacts represent a massive financial burden on an industry running on thin margins. And the 40 mph standard leaves a significant gap. NHTSA’s own data shows that side underride crashes “predominantly” occur at impact speeds above 40 mph, and a 2023 crash test showed a side guard failing to prevent a Ford Fiesta at 45 mph and a 45-degree angle from going under the trailer.

The Conversation Worth Having

The Stop Underrides Act 2.0 will almost certainly face the same political headwinds that killed its three predecessors. Every Democrat-only sponsored safety mandate introduced in a Republican-controlled Congress faces steep odds, and OOIDA’s opposition, which represents the owner-operators who would bear the cost through higher trailer prices, carries significant weight on Capitol Hill.

Whether this bill passes or dies is largely irrelevant. The real failure is the conversation itself.

We are having a debate about armoring trailers while refusing to have a serious national conversation about why people keep driving into them. Distracted driving is the single greatest preventable killer on American roads, and it is getting worse, not better. The smartphone has turned every car on the highway into a potential weapon, and our regulatory response has been scattered, underfunded, and politically timid.

You could mandate side underride guards on every trailer in America tomorrow, and people would still die, because the guards are rated to 40 mph, and distracted drivers don’t brake. The bill itself seems to implicitly acknowledge this: one of its supporting organizations is EndDistractedDriving.org. But the bill itself contains no provisions addressing distraction, no funding for enforcement, and no call for technology mandates for passenger vehicles.

That is not a safety bill. That is half a safety bill. And the missing half is the half that could actually move the needle.

We should also demand that the conversation be honest. The underride crisis is a distraction crisis by another name. Until we are willing to say that out loud, we will keep introducing the same bill every two years, keep having the same argument, and keep burying the same people.

The post A Billion-Dollar Fix for a Distraction Problem Disguised as an Underride Problem appeared first on FreightWaves.

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