Joshua Moran doesn’t remember colliding with the truck.

On Nov. 22, 2021, Moran was on his way to get lunch with one of his daughters. He was driving on an access road in San Antonio, Texas, when a truck making deliveries for Amazon exited the interstate and attempted a right-hand turn from the far left lane. Moran’s daughter would later tell him that he made a hard right, just narrowly avoiding a T-bone crash. Instead, when the vehicles collided, Moran’s car slid partly under the side of the truck.

Moran blacked out and woke up at the hospital. He said he had to have surgery on his foot, was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, fractured his knee and had two herniated discs in his back. His daughter sprained her foot and has since been diagnosed with PTSD from the crash.

“On my end, I feel like I did everything I needed to do: we had our seat belts on, I was on the right lane, I was going speed limit so I’m not really sure what else I could’ve done,” Moran told FRONTLINE. “I’m just grateful to be alive right now because I feel like if I hadn’t noticed it and I had just gone at my normal speeds, me and my daughter might not even be here right now.”

The crash Moran and his daughter were in is called an underride crash — a type of collision between a car and a truck that can often lead to serious injuries and death. These types of crashes are the focus of America’s Dangerous Trucks — a joint documentary by FRONTLINE and ProPublica that premieres June 13 on PBS and online. The investigation explains how underride crashes happen and traces the fight over measures that truck safety advocates say could save thousands of lives.

To better understand what underride crashes are and why they’re so dangerous, FRONTLINE spoke to a collision reconstruction expert in law enforcement, personal injury lawyers, advocates and a federal agency official whose department researched these crashes.

What is an underride crash?

An underride crash happens when a car slides underneath the body of a large truck in the gaps between the wheels, according to Biza Repko, a director in the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s physical infrastructure team, which released a report about underride crashes in 2019.

Such collisions can happen at either the rear or side of a truck. The Department of Transportation requires trailers to have a rear safety bar, known as an underride guard, to prevent these types of crashes. For years, truck safety advocates have called for stronger rear guards. Last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the department’s lead agency on the issue, finally updated its standards for rear guards. The department doesn’t mandate guards on the sides of trucks, which can help prevent side underride crashes.

Why is an underride crash so dangerous?

Underride crashes can lead to severe injuries because of the vehicles’ height difference, according to Daniel Bates, program manager of the New York State Police Collision Reconstruction Unit.

The point of impact in an underride crash is typically the hood or the windshield of the smaller vehicle, so some safety features in the car, such as airbags, may not be activated, Repko said.

In its 2019 report, the GAO found that the consequences of underride crashes — from serious head or neck injuries to fatalities — “are more likely to be severe.”

Read more: She Lost Two Daughters in a Truck Crash and Became a Safety Advocate

“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that I’ve ever seen a minor injury occur as a result of an underride crash,” said George Salinas, Moran’s attorney.

Usually, the drivers and passengers in the smaller vehicles are the ones who are most seriously harmed in these crashes, Bates said. Truck drivers are often uninjured because they sit higher up and away from the areas of impact. Sometimes, Bates said, truck drivers aren’t even aware that there’s been a collision.

How common are these types of crashes? Why have I not heard the term “underride crash” before?

More than 400 people died in underride crashes during 2021, according to an analysis of NHTSA’s data by FRONTLINE and ProPublica.

In its 2019 report, the GAO found that deaths from underride crashes represented less than 1% of total traffic fatalities from 2008 through 2017. But the agency also concluded that these fatalities are likely underreported. This was one of the threads of reporting in FRONTLINE and ProPublica’s investigation, with the team finding that many states don’t have a category in their crash reports to indicate if an underride crash occurred and that NHTSA’s databases can sometimes contradict each other.

Read more: How Regulators Failed to Act to Prevent Underride Crashes

Repko said her team found three main reasons for the potential underreporting of underride fatalities. First, there’s variability across states in how they define an underride crash — for instance, in one state, a local law enforcement official told Repko’s team that a vehicle’s hood would need to be more than 50% underneath the trailer for a crash to be classified as an underride; meanwhile, state police used a broader definition of a vehicle going underneath another by any amount. Second, there are inconsistencies in state-issued crash reporting forms on when to categorize a crash as an underride. And third, state and local police sometimes have limited information on how to identify and record an underride crash.

Repko’s team spoke with seven police departments for the 2019 report. While the officers they spoke with were generally familiar with the term, several of them said they had little to no training on how to identify and record information for underride crashes.

“Lots of different states and localities develop their own form, but if they’re not really getting training on what constitutes an underride crash, then they may be recording it differently,” Repko said.

Joe Fried, a personal injury lawyer in Atlanta who specializes in truck accidents, spoke to FRONTLINE about the impact of people not knowing how to define an underride crash. “If you don’t check a box on a police report, if there’s not a box to check on a police report that says underride, then how do we know the extent of the problem?”

Based on its findings, the GAO made recommendations to NHTSA to 1) standardize a definition of underride crashes and include underride as a recommended data field on crash report forms; and 2) provide information to police departments on how to identify and record underride crashes. The first recommendation is in progress, and the GAO has marked the second one as “implemented” after NHTSA and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration published a pamphlet in August 2022 with plans to distribute it to educate police.

The GAO report’s findings are in line with what personal injury lawyers and advocates have been saying for years: that underride crashes happen more than the data suggests.

Some people FRONTLINE and ProPublica spoke with during the course of reporting didn’t know what an underride crash was until their loved ones were involved in one.

“I don’t think underride crashes are a perceived threat to most of the general public because you really don’t know about it unless you or a family member is in one,” Salinas said.

The aftermath of an underride crash

Moran and his family struggled after the crash. Moran and his wife had been in the process of buying a house, but because Moran had to go on short-term disability after the accident, he said they weren’t able to close the deal.

Moran has filed a civil lawsuit against the truck driver, Amazon and the delivery company.

A lawyer representing both the truck driver and the delivery company said her clients declined to comment.

When asked about the pending litigation, Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said in a statement, “We take the safety of our partners and their employees very seriously and provide extensive training and resources with the intent of preventing any crash. Underride accidents impact the entire trucking industry, which is why we’ll continue to innovate in pursuit of this goal.”

Moran is back at work now, but he still has some mobility issues — he has to take his time getting out of his chair and the first few steps he takes after standing up hurt. He says his short-term memory was also affected by the crash.

While his daughter’s physical injuries were minor, Moran said that after the crash, she was terrified anytime she had to get into a car and her grades started to plummet. After being diagnosed with PTSD, she was able to get accommodations in school. Since then, her grades have been improving and she’s been doing better, Moran said.

“It’s been a very difficult healing process,” Moran said.

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