Technical Paper
Comparison of Occupant Fatality Factors in Underride Passenger Car Accidents in India and USA
2020-04-14
2020-01-0984
Underride accidents constitute around 5% and 4% of all accidents in India and the US respectively. Yet, the occupant fatality risk is the highest in this accident configuration when compared to other configurations for passenger cars. Especially in India, the fatality rate is even higher due to minimal usage of underride protection devices in the front, rear and sides of commercial vehicles along with poor passenger vehicle crashworthiness. This study specifically aims to compare the factors influencing occupant fatality in the rear underride accidents in India and the US. Given the large number of variables involved in an accident and their complex interaction in a small duration, it was realized that a statistical analysis of this nature will only give an insight into the accident risk trends. The influencing factors are identified by performing Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which is a linear feature extraction technique.