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Rational design for fire safety necessarily includes consideration of risk tradeoffs that tend to reduce one risk but may increase another. Traditional engineering design criteria can be supplemented with important factors that rely on expertise from other disciplines. Engineering analysis may be able to address reduction in fire risk due to the introduction of new technology, but may not address the social costs associated with this new technology. For example, the resultant increase in vehicle cost may prevent some people from purchasing a vehicle (impacting individuals' lives), may reduce the number of vehicles sold (impacting manufacturers), and may reduce taxes collected (impacting the government). This must be weighed against decreased risk of property damage, injury, and fatality due to fire. In this paper, the methods of benefit-cost analysis from economics were applied to make this evaluation.

Previous studies have shown that occupant kinematics in lateral impacts are different for near- and far-side occupants. Additionally, injuries to far-side occupants in high-speed lateral impacts have been better documented in the scientific literature; few studies have looked at low-speed far-side occupants. The purpose of this study was to determine the risk of lumbar spine injury for restrained and unrestrained far-side occupants in low- to moderate- speed lateral impacts. The NASS/CDS database was queried for far-side occupants in lateral impacts for different levels of impact severity (categorized by Delta-V): 0 to 8 km/h, 8 to 16 km/h, 16 to 24 km/h and 24 to 32 km/h. To further understand the lumbar spine injuries sustained by occupants in real-world impacts, far-side lateral impact tests with ATDs from the NHTSA Biomechanics Test Database were used to estimate lumbar loads in generic far-side sled tests.