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Since 1966 the federal government, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has promulgated regulations governing the crash safety of motor vehicles, with particular attention to passenger cars. However, during the next four years, most of the regulations will also apply to light trucks and vans. There are now 53 Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). These standards primarily regulate the safety of new vehicles. For many disabled persons, especially those confined to wheelchairs, vehicles must be extensively modified to allow them to drive, or to ride as passengers. The objective of this paper is to examine the safety level intended to be afforded to able bodied persons by the crashworthiness FMVSS and to make observations on the special requirements of modified vehicles to afford the same level of safety to disabled persons. We will emphasize the safety needs of those who use vans since vans are the vehicles most extensively modified.

Barrier crash testing is routinely performed with heavy reliance on data collected from electronic sources, supplemented by observational data from high speed films. High speed film analysis is usually performed to supplement and validate the displacements derived from the processing of electronic transducer data. This in itself is a useful tool, but other uses of film data have yet to be fully utilized. Until recent advancements in hardware and software, little reliance has been placed on film analysis as an independent source of data. Analysis of high speed film as a sole source of obtaining displacement, velocity and acceleration data is a valuable tool in that the measurement system is totally non-obtrusive (i.e., the kinematics of the system being measured are not potentially affected or altered by the camera system used for film analysis).