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Steering control devices are used by people who have difficulty gripping the steering wheel. These devices have projections that may extend up to 14 cm toward the occupant. Testing indicated that contact with certain larger steering control devices with tall rigid projections could severely injure a driver in a frontal collision. In order to reduce this injury risk, an alternative, less injurious design was developed and tested. This design, which included replacing unyielding aluminum projections with compliant plastic ones, produced significantly lower peak contact pressure and less damage to the chest of a cadaver test subject, while maintaining the strength necessary to be useful.

This paper presents information on analytical procedures being developed to characterize a “baseline” vehicle fleet in frontal crashes. A newly developed analytical model is being implemented for this characterization. The Passenger/Driver Simulation model (PADS) can simulate unrestrained and restrained driver and passenger occupants in frontal crashes. The “baseline” characterization started with the selection of representative passenger car make/model groupings. Each grouping has similar structural and interior characteristics. The PADS model is being run in an automated mode simulating these vehicles in different frontal crash configurations. The output of the PADS runs includes measures of injury severity and the cause of the injury. The PADS output obtained in these automated runs will be compared to field accident data. Since the analytical procedures and tools are still being refined, this paper focuses on the methodology and its implementation rather than the results.

This paper presents information on analytical procedures being developed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to assess the safety problem associated with occupants of passenger cars involved in frontal impacts. This analytical assessment started with the characterization of a baseline vehicle fleet consisting of specific make/model passenger car groupings representative of the in-use fleet in the United States. Newly developed analytical models have been developed and are being run in an automated mode simulating these vehicles in different frontal crash configurations. The output of these automated runs includes measures of injury severity and cause of injury, and is being used to identify the effect of different vehicle attributes on injury causation. Preliminary analytical results are presented on the relationship between steering assembly structural attributes and injury severity.

This paper presents some current methods of evaluating vehicle aggressivity. Current methods under development include the use of a honeycomb front impact barrier which measures loads across the vehicle frontal area. Analytical methods are also available to model a combination of vehicles in frontal collisions and the associated occupant responses. In addition, a theoretical method is presented to measure aggressivity. The new methodology also uses a deformable barrier in frontal impact testing. This barrier, however, is modeled to represent a non-aggressive vehicle, used as a standard against which aggressivity characteristics of all cars can be measured.