As transportation technology continues to advance exponentially, road incidents have gotten more expensive and more complicated to repair. Preventing damage not only protects an expensive investment but also helps to avoid even costlier downtime for fleets and drivers.
Adam Roorda, head of marketing at Ex-Guard, joined Loaded and Rolling host Thomas Wasson to talk about how carrier fleets can reduce towable accidents and mitigate damage with high-quality grille guards.
Ex-Guard is an Iowa-based company with products that are designed to work seamlessly with advanced safety features, such as sensors and cameras.
To ensure their guards are compliant with new safety technology, Ex-Guard works directly with truck OEMs to verify specifications. “Our guards are designed to work around modern truck sensors,” Roorda said. “As of today, Ex-Guard has been verified to work with the radar in all major manufacturer’s collision mitigation systems. We make sure our guards avoid what’s called the ‘no-zones’ so that these systems work exactly like they’re supposed to with the guard installed.”
However, even the most advanced safety devices are incapable of controlling incoming damage. “There’s a misnomer that today’s technology will prevent most accidents,” Roorda said. “It’s true that it can certainly help drivers and avoid some instances of collisions, but there are so many things coming at trucks that the drivers simply can’t stop. There’s a huge need for dependable protection and a hard product that can mitigate serious damage.”
There is no shortage of hazards on today’s roads. Litter, trees, animals, parking lot collisions and unsecured loads damage thousands of vehicles every day in the U.S. and Canada.
Roorda also noted that major Ex-Guard fleets have shared how Ex-Guard has helped reduce all types of towable accidents by 80%.
“It’s Murphy’s law: What can happen will eventually happen to every fleet, especially with so many miles on the open road,” Roorda said. “Every day we see crazier things. A lot of folks think of our products as deer guards, and that’s true. We protect against deer and elk and moose, but there’s plenty of other occurrences that we see every single day,” he said.
“When carriers think about everything that happens that doesn’t get reported and instances beyond animal strikes, they really see the value in protecting their assets with grille guards.”
Show host Thomas Wasson presented a series of dashcam clips that demonstrated Ex-Guard products in action.
In one video, footage shows a truck driver backing into the grille guard of the truck behind it not once but three times while in traffic.
“That’s what we call the Triple Crown of accidents. You see the driver hit three times, and that’s nothing he could have stopped,” Roorda said.
It’s common for trucks to collide at low speeds in that type of incident, he says, especially when there’s an inexperienced driver, blind spots, or emergencies and distractions ahead.
“Most of the time, that will have to be reported as damage,” Roorda said. “It will usually require a bumper replacement, new paint, headlight repair and potentially much more costly fixes.”
According to Roorda, even these low-speed collisions often cost upward of $5,000 to $6,000. Worse yet are the costs of two to three days’ worth of downtime for driver and truck. “You’re closing in on $10,000 in damage for a lot of minor incidents like that,” he said.
Due to DOT regulations, many damaged trucks cannot continue driving. Although Ex-Guard can and does repair grille guards that have been affected by accidents, cosmetic damage to the grille guard itself does not prevent the driver from legally continuing down the road. “In that particular instance, the grille guard simply bent, and all it took to repair was a bracket replacement. Even then, the driver could have driven as it was,” Roorda said.
Internal rate-of-return data gathered by Ex-Guard shows that about two-thirds of the cost of any given incident can come from the downtime as opposed to repair. Insurance reimbursement for the more intangible costs such as lost potential income can be difficult to recover. “Quality grille guards save you beyond what you pay for repairs,” Roorda said.
Depending on how complex your equipment is, he says, it costs most fleets roughly $1,200 to $1,500 per day to have a truck stranded in the shop for unexpected repairs.
In another dashcam video, footage shows a passenger car swerve in front of a truck and spin away due to the collision. Eventually, both vehicles drove away largely undamaged.
In this incident, not only was the truck spared from costly damage, but the driver of the car was safer due to the force of the impact occurring along the wide area of the grille guard.
“This was thankfully just a medium-speed accident, and in this case the driver of the car was able to simply drive away with no damage except to the paint,” said Roorda. “What a lot of folks don’t understand is that our guards have a demonstrated ability to provide some front-underrun protection. This car was essentially bounced off but could have been much worse.”
“There’s peace of mind knowing that our guards prevent damage that could be not just costly but also much more dangerous to the public,” he said.
Another benefit of equipping a truck with Ex-Guard grille guards comes in the form of lowered insurance costs. “Don’t forget to check with your insurance company and get credit for running the extra layer of protection,” Roorda said. “Your rates can be lower, and insurance companies want to incentivize that damage mitigation, whether that’s through a captive program or other discounts.”
In a third video clip, dashcam footage shows an incident where a trailer in front of the driver has a blowout. As a result, an entire tire bounces off another vehicle and strikes the protected truck directly on the grille guard.
“There’s nothing you could have done to avoid that,” Roorda said. “The other trailer had dry-rotted tires.”
“A new collision mitigation system is going to be close to $5,000, so deflected debris like the tires shown here can lead to massive savings,” said Roorda.
Engineers at Ex-Guard crunched the numbers from the footage and concluded that the force of this impact was roughly equivalent to a bowling ball striking the truck at over 230 mph.
“With that kind of mass flying around at highway speeds, that’s no joke,” Roorda said. “It’s not something drivers can afford to take lightly. Not just from a maintenance standpoint but also a safety standpoint. Your radiator might be replaceable, but your drivers aren’t.”
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