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Test methods for vehicle safety development are either based on the movement of a vehicle into a stationary barrier or the movement of a barrier into a stationary vehicle. When deemed necessary, a two-moving-vehicle impact is approximated by modifying the impact motion between the moving and stationary objects. For example, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 214 side-impact crash test procedure [1] approximates the lateral impact of a moving vehicle into the side of another moving vehicle by using a moving barrier with wheels crabbed so that the velocity vector of the barrier is not collinear with its longitudinal axis. Such approximations are valid when the post-impact motions of the two vehicles are not to be evaluated. Similarly, the published data indicates that historic analyses of motorcycle accidents and the advancements in motorcycle safety designs have been based, in large part, on single-moving-vehicle crash tests.

Low-speed collisions between tractor-semitrailers and passenger vehicles may result in large areas of visible damage to the passenger vehicle, but often produce limited damage to the tractor-semitrailer. Despite this, such accidents may lead to assertions of serious injury to the tractor driver and/or sleeper compartment occupant. Research regarding the impact environment and resulting injury potential of the occupants during these types of impacts is limited. This research investigated driver and sleeper compartment occupant responses to relatively low-speed and low-acceleration impact events. Five crash tests involving impact between a tractor-semitrailer and a passenger car were conducted. The test vehicles were a van semitrailer pulled by a tractor and three identical mid-sized sedans. The occupants of the tractor included a human driver and an un-instrumented Hybrid III 50th-percentile-male anthropomorphic test device (ATD).