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This paper presents a framework to incorporate the notion of reliability into crashworthy designs of automotive vehicle components. Optimal design for crashworthiness is a challenging task in itself as it involves time dependent complex interactions among bodies along with material and geometric nonlinearities. Maximum energy absorption in the structure is widely used as a design criteria in crashworthiness designs as long as penetration levels are kept under allowable limits. These designs behave well and are safe as long as loading conditions and material properties are deterministic however failure can happen due to excessive penetration under uncertain conditions. Hence a semi coupled reliability based crashworthiness design methodology is proposed in which independent reliability assessments are done on the designs at various intermediate levels during an iterative design cycle of a crashworthy structure.