Are Impact Dog Crates Crash Tested?

The short answer. No. Impact Dog Crates are not crash certified. The brand does not appear on the Center for Pet Safety certified list, and we could not find a crash test published by Impact itself — not a speed, not a lab, not a test-dog weight, not a protocol. Impact is also not pretending otherwise: its own marketing sells containment and escape resistance, not collision performance. The crash claim is one buyers attach to the brand themselves, because it is aluminum and it is expensive.

That is the whole of the crash answer, and it takes one paragraph. The more useful question is the one people ask next — is it worth it anyway? — and there the answer is yes, for a reason that has nothing to do with cars, and that applies to one of Impact’s three crates and not the other two.

“Crash tested” and “crash certified” are not the same claim

This distinction runs through the whole category and it is worth being precise about, because it is what makes the Impact question answerable at all.

Crash tested is a manufacturer statement. It means a brand paid a lab, chose the protocol, chose the pass mark, and decided what to publish. There is no obligation to publish a failure, and several brands in this category publish the phrase without the speed, the dummy weight or the lab.

Crash certified means the Center for Pet Safety — a non-profit that states it does not accept funding from pet product manufacturers — tested the product against a published protocol and listed the outcome where anyone can read it. There is no federal standard for pet restraints and no government agency tests them, so CPS certification is the only independent mark in the category.

Impact holds neither. It is not on the certified list, and it does not make the weaker manufacturer claim either. The mechanics of the certification, and what the protocol does and does not cover, are in CPS crash testing explained.

What Impact publishes, and what it does not

Judge a brand on what it is willing to put in writing. Impact publishes a material — aluminum, powder-coated, welded — and it publishes a warranty, which we will come to, because it is the best in the category by a distance.

What it does not publish is the number that would let you compare it to anything: the aluminum gauge. Not for the High Anxiety, not for the Collapsible, not for the Stationary. This is the same pattern the site keeps running into — the component that decides the outcome is the component nobody specifies. On harnesses it is the buckle, on leashes it is the clip, on steel crates it is the gauge. ProSelect, a far cheaper brand, does publish its steel gauge. Impact, at three times the price, does not publish its aluminum one.

It also does not publish a crash test. We looked for one, and for the avoidance of doubt this page is not claiming Impact suppressed anything — there is simply nothing to find, and the brand’s own safety language is about dogs getting out rather than about collisions. “Not published” is a legitimate finding and we record it as one.

Why so many buyers assume it is crash rated

Three things, and all three are reasonable mistakes.

It is aluminum and it is expensive. Every crate that is certified — Gunner, Lucky Duck, Cabela’s GunDog — is also a rotomolded or aluminum box in the same price bracket. The categories overlap so heavily in the showroom that certification looks like a property of the price rather than a property of the specific product and size.

Impact sells an airline crate. Airline compliance is a real standard and a completely unrelated one: it governs ventilation, fastenings and labeling for cargo transport. It says nothing about collision performance. A crate can be airline compliant and offer no crash protection at all, and the two are routinely conflated.

The Collapsible is marketed for travel. Travel is not the same word as crash. A crate can be excellent at going in a truck and being set up at a trial, and carry no certification for what happens at 30 mph into a barrier.

The one sentence that decides which Impact to buy

Here is what Impact is genuinely best in the category at, and it is not a safety claim — it is a warranty claim, and it is remarkable.

The High Anxiety carries a Lifetime Dog Damage Guarantee. Impact’s wording: “If your dog breaks it, we’ll replace it.” In a category built on excluding precisely that, this is close to unique. Gunner’s warranty “does not extend to cover destruction done to the product by the pet.” ProSelect excludes “breakage or damage caused by user or dog.” Diggs excludes chewing. The industry position is that your dog destroying the crate is your problem, and Impact is the one brand that took the other side.

And then the catch, in Impact’s own words on the same page:

“This warranty only applies to our High Anxiety crates and does not apply to our Collapsible or Stationary crates.”

That is the sentence. A buyer who has heard “Impact replaces it if your dog breaks it” and then buys the Collapsible — the model most people actually want, because it folds — has bought a crate on the strength of a guarantee that does not cover it. The separate warranty that does apply excludes, in Impact’s words, “dog damage, paint issues, or normal wear and tear like scratches.” For a crate bought because the dog destroys crates, dog damage is the only exclusion that matters.

So the brand-level reputation is real and the model-level reality is narrower. That gap is worth more to a buyer than the crash question that brought them here.

Which Impact, if you buy one

The dog is the threat — it destroys or escapes crates: the High Anxiety, and only the High Anxiety. It is the one model where the guarantee contemplates the dog winning, and that guarantee is the entire argument for paying Impact’s prices. Our escape-proof crate roundup ranks it first for exactly this reason.

You want the build, in one place, and the dog is not destructive: the Stationary. A fixed welded frame has no folding hinge, which removes a failure point the Collapsible has, and it costs less than the High Anxiety. Buy it for the construction, not for the warranty.

You need it to fold for trials, trucks and travel: the Collapsible — with both eyes open about what its warranty excludes, and knowing it carries no certification for the vehicle it was bought to ride in.

Crash protection is the actual requirement: do not buy an Impact for that job. Buy something on the certified list, in the exact size that was certified.