What is the difference between impact protection and ram raid protection?
Accidental impact is the everyday risk for any store with parking that faces the shopfront. A car nosing into a bay at low speed, a reversing vehicle, a driver who confuses the pedals. The job of the bollard is to stop that car before it reaches the glass, the entry or the people standing near it.
A ram raid is a deliberate attack. The vehicle is aimed at the shopfront or a roller door, often at night, and the offender expects to force a way through. Protection against that is usually specified by security advice, and often involves tested products, removable or lockable bollards across roller doors, and other measures behind the glass.
Many stores need some of both. The point is to decide, site by site, which risk you are buying protection against.
What does crash rated actually mean?
A crash rated bollard has been tested by driving a vehicle of a set weight into it at a set speed under an international test standard, such as IWA 14, PAS 68 or ASTM F2656. The rating describes that product, installed on that foundation, in that test. Change the footing or the slab and the rating no longer tells you much.
ISO withdrew IWA 14 in May 2023 and replaced it with ISO 22343-1:2023, so a bollard tested since then may quote that standard instead. Ask which standard, which vehicle and which speed the rating is for.
Crash rated hostile vehicle work is specialist security engineering. Nextage does not offer it. What we do is vehicle impact protection for retail shopfronts, entries and pedestrian edges, and we say so before a scope is written rather than after.
Which stores should be protected first?
Across a fleet, risk is never even. Things worth recording at each store:
- Parking bays that point straight at the shopfront or entry
- The distance between the end of a bay and the glass
- Kerb height, or the lack of one
- Where pedestrians wait, queue or collect orders
- Roller doors and after hours exposure
- Any incident history, including near misses the store team remembers
A short audit across the fleet turns those notes into a ranked list, so the first year of capital goes to the stores that most need it, not the store that complained loudest.
What shapes the scope of a shopfront bollard install?
A catalogue entry for a single bollard tells you very little about a retail program. What matters is the installed scope at each site, and it moves with:
- The mounting method: cast in the ground, core drilled into an existing slab, or surface mounted on a base plate
- The slab: its thickness, condition, and what services run under it, which should be scanned before anyone drills
- Removable or lockable bollards across roller doors
- How many bollards, and the spacing needed to stop a car while keeping access for prams, trolleys and wheelchairs
- Finish, such as galvanised steel, covers or sleeves
- After hours work, traffic management and making good the surface
That is why Nextage scopes bollard programs per site after the audit, rather than working bollard by bollard.
How do you keep bollards consistent across many stores?
Write the specification down and freeze it: wall thickness, diameter, height, finish and footing. Without that, every installer picks their own, and after a few years the same brand has a different bollard at every store.
Nextage runs storefront protection this way: an audit of the high risk sites, one frozen specification, a scope per site that can be staged across financial years, installation to that specification in every state, and a photo completion report for each store.
Sources, links checked 10 November 2026: ASTM F2656, crash testing of vehicle security barriers (ASTM)
