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Rear underride crashes kill thousands of people yearly worldwide. Underride guards did not follow the progress achieved by the automotive safety technology. Searching for solutions to this problem, two new guards have been designed and three crash tests carried out. A new articulated, an energy absorbing conceptual guard and a guard constructed according to the European (ECE-R58) regulation were tested. Both the new guards could avoid underride, the ECE-R58 one could not. The tests pointed out that the new articulated guard could be used after a few modifications and the conceptual one needs further optimization to become commercially feasible.

Recent studies in the USA show 2800 passenger casualties/year, due to automobiles and light vehicles impacting against the front structure of medium and heavy trucks at speeds over 45 mph. This same driver or passenger leaves the vehicle and becomes a pedestrian. What is being done in the automotive industry to face this situation? What improvements can be expected in automobiles, trucks and buses in the XXI century? The results obtained in this work show that it is possible and very important for new projects and modernization of commercial vehicles (trucks and buses) to introduce a front bumper concept foreseeing the Passive Safety of third parties (passenger vehicles).

Rear underride crashes are responsible for thousands of deaths every year in Brazil. To support the fight against this calamity, it was design and tested an articulated guard able to avoid car underride. Because of its articulation capability, this guard can be placed as low as necessary without impairing the truck maneuverability. Crash tests were carried out with the new guard and with another one constructed according to Brazilian standards. The articulated guard was able to avoid underride of a vehicle GM Corsa colliding at 50 km/h in offset of 50%. The other guard could not avoid underride under the same test conditions.

Vehicle Safety is very attractive, concerning active or passive safety. The collisions are intensively studied including deformations, kinematics, protections, devices and injuries. By the way, today we have a lot of computer programs trying to simulate these crash-tests. But, we can have an idea about the magnitude of the impact forces of a vehicle against a rigid wall starting from known physical concepts and simplified approximations. This is one of the purposes of this work. The classic problem of projectile impacts against a rigid wall and the example of an aircraft impact against a nuclear power plant are used to consider the models applied to vehicles. We consider the disacceleration of a material point and also the vehicle as an extense object. Real data are used to quantify the achieved expressions. We compare and discuss the magnitude of the forces, for instance, between a passenger car and a commercial vehicle.