The Best Crash-Tested Dog Harnesses

There are three CPS-certified dog car harnesses in existence. Three. The entire certified list is:

• Sleepypod Clickit Sport— 5 star. Per-size ratings: Small to 25 lb; Medium 45–90 lb; Large 75–90 lb; XL to 90 lb
• Sleepypod Clickit Range — 5 star, tested at 110 lb (November 2022). The only certified harness for a giant-breed dog
• Saker Bomber Harness — 5 star, tested at 75 lb (November 2022)

That is the whole list. Everything else in this roundup — Kurgo, EzyDog, Ruffwear — is not certified, whatever its packaging implies. We have included them anyway, because they are what most people actually buy, and you deserve to know exactly what you are getting.

“Crash tested” is not “crash certified”

This is the distinction the entire category is built on blurring, and it is worth being precise about.

Crash tested can mean a brand paid a lab to run its product through a test and liked the result enough to print it. There is no obligation to publish the failures.

CPS certified means the Center for Pet Safety — a 501(c)(3) non-profit that takes no funding from pet product manufacturers — ran the product against a published protocol and put the result on its public list, pass or fail.

To Kurgo’s real credit, they are the most transparent of the self-testers: they publish the lab (Calspan, Buffalo NY), the standard (FMVSS 213, the federal child-restraint standard), the date (June 2018), the products (Enhanced Strength Tru-Fit v3 and Impact v1), the rated dog weights (25, 50 and 75 lb) and the excursion limits they had to stay inside. That is far more than almost anyone else publishes and it deserves acknowledgement.

It is still not independent certification. And there is history here that a buyer ought to know.

The Kurgo Tru-Fit failed CPS testing — and that is the point

When the Center for Pet Safety independently crash-tested harnesses in its 2013 study, the Kurgo Tru-Fit did not pass. CPS’s published result:

“Head Excursion Measurement (FMVSS 213) was exceeded for medium size. Failure of size small and large met CPS Catastrophic Failure Definition.”

Kurgo subsequently redesigned the harness and had the new version tested at Calspan in 2018. That is a legitimate thing for a company to do, and the current Enhanced Strength version is a different product from the one CPS failed.

But note what the Amazon listing for the current Tru-Fit says: “Crash Test Certified Fit.” Certified by whom? Not by the only organisation that certifies these products. That phrase is doing an enormous amount of work, and this is precisely why we wrote the explainer.

Certification is per size — and the same harness can pass and fail

The best evidence that size matters comes from CPS’s own 2013 results. The Sleepypod Clickit Utility — the top performer in that study — passed in Small and Medium and exceeded the head-excursion limit in Large. The RC Pet harness passed Small and Medium and met the catastrophic failure definition in X-Large.

The same harness, the same materials, the same brand — and the large size catastrophically failed while the small one passed. That is why “crash tested” without a size and a weight attached is not information.

CPS publishes the Clickit Sport as per-size ratings for exactly this reason — Small to 25 lb, Medium 45–90 lb, Large 75–90 lb, XL to 90 lb — and it had to physically inspect the Medium, Large and XL to confirm they used identical materials, stitching and hardware before it would extend the rating across them.