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Because of their frequency, reducing car occupant injuries in frontal impacts should be a major priority. For belted occupants, significant increases in protection require improvements to the structural integrity of passenger compartments, which itself demands improved impact energy management. The current frontal impact legislative tests fail to assess a car's ability to cope with certain important impact characteristics commonly seen in accidents. Furthermore, the development of the TRRL Experimental Safety Car ESV 87 has shown that, even with small cars, these requirements can be accommodated as can much higher energy impacts. A new test procedure could be developed which would lead to cars with improved accident impact performance. Such a change can be expected to result in a significant reduction in injuries.

A demonstration pedestrian safety car has been produced based on the Austin Metro car. The modifications did not require the use of materials not already familiar to the motor industry, and changes to the car's styling were limited. The modifications have been shown to give substantial improvements in the level of protection offered to adult and child pedestrians up to impact speeds of 40 km/h. In particular, the most frequently injured body region, the lower limbs, was afforded much increased protection. Tests on the head impact area indicated that worthwhile reductions in child head injuries could be expected. It should be possible for modifications of the type made to this car to be incorporated in other production cars, in which case significant reductions in pedestrian injuries could be expected

An in-depth crash injury investigation was undertaken to provide data to relate the probability of injury to impact severity, in frontal and side impacts. Estimates for the probability of injury for unbelted and belted occupants were established using Probit Analysis This has quantified the reductions in the probability of injury due to seat belt use, and thus provides additional information supporting the effectiveness of seat belts for different impact severities. The results obtained are suitable for matching with experimental test data to establish improved estimates of human tolerance to impact.

When impact tests are performed on cars to assess the level of protection afforded in side impacts it is tempting to use the test dummies which were originally designed with frontal impact in mind. However, examination of the two situations shows that side impacts, where intrusion plays a more significant part in injury causation, are sufficiently different from frontal impacts for a special test device to be needed. This paper illustrates, from crash-injury studies, the types of injury seen in side impacts. These show that forces rather than accelerations should be measured, because serious injuries can be caused by localised forces to the torso and by crushing of the pelvis. The development of a special dummy designed to measure these forces in side impacts has already been described. This dummy has been calibrated against accident data and tentative human tolerance limits have been proposed.