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Nowadays, the use of high-speed digital cameras to acquire relevant information is a standard for all laboratories and facilities working in passive safety crash testing. The recorded information from the cameras is used to develop and improve the design of vehicles in order to make them safer. Measurements such as velocities, accelerations and distances are computed from high-speed images captured during the tests and represent remarkable data for the post-crash analysis. Therefore, having the exact same position of the cameras is a key factor to be able to compare all the values that are extracted from the images of the tests carried out within a long-term passive safety project. However, since working with several customers involves a large amount of different cars and tests, crash facilities have to readapt for every test mode making it difficult for them to reproduce the correct and precise position of the high-speed cameras throughout the same project.

While accident data show a decreasing number of fatalities and serious injuries on European Union (EU) roads, recent data from ERSO (European Road Safety Observatory) show an increasing proportion of elderly in the fatality statistics. Due to the continuous increase of life expectancy in Europe and other highly-developed countries, the elderly make up a higher number of drivers and other road users such as bicyclists and pedestrians whose mobility needs and habits have been changing over recent years. Moreover, due to their greater vulnerability, the elderly are more likely to be seriously injured in any given accident than younger people. With the goal of improving the safety mobility of the elderly, the SENIORS Project, funded by the European Commission, is investigating and assessing the injury reduction that can be achieved through innovative tools and safety systems.

Over recent decades climate change and air pollution have become an increasingly important issue and so the transportation policies of many countries aim to make vehicles more efficient and promote the development and use of electric vehicles. According to the European Automotive Manufacturers Association, the registration of electric vehicles showed a substantial increase of 160.5%, that makes stakeholders assume a realistic market share for new electrically chargeable vehicles to be in the range of 2 to 8% by 2020 to 2025, based on today’s market. Electric and hybrid vehicles are submitted to the same passive and active safety standards as fossil fuel engine vehicles and so they have to pass crash tests defined by homologation regulations or other consumer standards such as Euro NCAP.

In the 70’s, to reduce vehicle crash fatalities, NHTSA launched a Program, called NCAP, to compare the safety of cars. This Program was copied in Europe and around the world. It has been demonstrated that this kind of public assessment has forced OEM’s to invest in safety and to develop safer vehicles. Nowadays, NCAPs exist for nearly all regions around the world; all of them with the aim of improving vehicle safety. They apply the philosophy of an “overall rating”. In that way the information aims to be clearer and more general and will help to compare cars. Nevertheless, even though in every NCAP the overall assessment is given by a unique star rating, the specifications and requirements in each protocol are different. Each NCAP has been adapted to each region’s conditions, accidentology and traffic and therefore assessment criteria have their own peculiarities.