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Test methods for vehicle safety development are either based on the movement of a vehicle into a stationary barrier or the movement of a barrier into a stationary vehicle. When deemed necessary, a two-moving-vehicle impact is approximated by modifying the impact motion between the moving and stationary objects. For example, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 214 side-impact crash test procedure [1] approximates the lateral impact of a moving vehicle into the side of another moving vehicle by using a moving barrier with wheels crabbed so that the velocity vector of the barrier is not collinear with its longitudinal axis. Such approximations are valid when the post-impact motions of the two vehicles are not to be evaluated. Similarly, the published data indicates that historic analyses of motorcycle accidents and the advancements in motorcycle safety designs have been based, in large part, on single-moving-vehicle crash tests.

There has been little published research into simulating two-moving motorcycle-to-car collisions for the purpose of accident reconstruction. In this paper a series of two-moving crash tests were conducted to study collisions of this type. These tests used a range of speeds for the cars and the motorcycles involved, with perpendicular and oblique intersection collision impact configurations. The tests were then simulated with two popular crash simulation packages which were not designed to simulate motorcycles. The purpose of this study was to evaluate existing techniques and develop new techniques for simulating motorcycles in these software packages and then to examine the ability of each package to simulate a two-moving motorcycle-to-car crash. The results demonstrate that it is indeed possible to simulate a motorcycle in these packages and that both packages can simulate two-moving motorcycle-to-car crashes reasonably well.