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In a joint effort between Ford Motor Company, Visteon Automotive Systems, Textron Automotive Company, and Dow Automotive the 1999 Mercury Cougar instrument panel (IP) was designed and engineered to reduce the weight and overall cost of the IP system. The original IP architecture changed from a traditional design that relied heavily upon the steel structure to absorb and dissipate unbelted occupant energy during frontal collisions to a hybrid design that utilizes both plastic and steel to manage energy. This design approach further reduced IP system weight by 1.88 Kg and yielded significant system cost savings. The hybrid instrument panel architecture in the Cougar utilizes a steel cross car beam coupled to steel energy absorbing brackets and a ductile thermoplastic substrate. The glove box assembly and the driver knee bolster are double shell injection molded structures that incorporate molded-in ribs for added stiffness.

Close-out panels, or knee bolsters, have become an important component of structural instrument panels. Using plastic in these structures has proven successful but can be costly to develop by trial and error technique. Estimating their behavior through mathematical modeling software is one way to reduce development time and cost. This paper discusses the correlation of test parts which have similar structures to bolsters used in production today with results of finite element analysis (FEA) modeling.