Search Results

The problem of incompatibility between different car types has become an important issue in the society. In two- car crashes, the aggressivity to the other vehicles is a factor often mentioned. In this study aggressivity is defined as the influence on injury outcome in the other vehicle due to differences in car structure and mass of the studied vehicle. The study was based on police-reported two-car collisions in Sweden. The influence of car mass and structure on driver relative injury risk was for some vehicle categories analyzed with a new developed technique where the influence of mass and structure was separated. SUVs were found to have 32% higher mass factor and 23% higher structural aggressivity factor than the average value, resulting in a 62% higher total aggressivity factor than the average.

AIS1 neck injuries are the most frequent disabling injuries among car occupants in road traffic accidents. Although neck injury is mostly regarded as resulting from rear end collisions, almost one third of all neck injuries occur in frontal impacts. Several studies have shown the effect of airbags on injury and fatality rates. However, studies of the effect of airbags on the risk of injuries to different body regions are rare. Airbags and seatbelt pretensioners may influence especially the risk of neck injuries. This paper presents influence of airbags and pretensioners on reported neck injury risk in frontal impacts. Cars fitted with airbags in combination with pretensioners and cars without have been analyzed. Since 1992, approximately 150,000 vehicles on the Swedish market have been equipped with crash pulse recorders to measuring frontal impacts.

Pedestrians and bicyclists account for a significant share of deaths and serious injuries in the road transport system. The protection of pedestrians in car-to-pedestrian crashes has therefore been addressed by friendlier car fronts and since 1997, the European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP) has assessed the level of protection for most car models available in Europe. In the current study, Euro NCAP pedestrian scoring was compared with real-life injury outcomes in car-to-pedestrian and car-to-bicyclist crashes occurring in Sweden. Approximately 1200 injured pedestrians and 2000 injured bicyclists were included in the study. Groups of cars with low, medium and high pedestrian scores were compared with respect to pedestrian injury severity on the Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale (MAIS)-level and risk of permanent medical impairment (RPMI). Significant injury reductions to both pedestrians and bicyclists were found between low and high performing cars.

In the design of a safe road transport system there is a need to better understand the safety challenges lying ahead. One way of doing that is to evaluate safety technology with retrospective analysis of crashes. However, by using retrospective data there is the risk of adapting safety innovations to scenarios irrelevant in the future. Also, challenges arise as safety interventions do not act alone but are rather interacting components in a complex road transport system. The objective of this study was therefore to facilitate the prioritizing of road safety measures by developing and applying a new method to consider possible impact of future vehicle safety technology. The key point was to project the chain of events leading to a crash today into the crashes for a given time in the future. Assumptions on implementation on safety technologies were made and these assumptions were applied on the crashes of today.