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This paper reports on the status of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) research program on Improved Frontal Protection. The program is in the problem determination phase. Accident analysis is being conducted to predict the injury producing crash environment for occupants with air bags, to determine appropriate test conditions, dummy sizes and injury measures, and to predict potential benefits. The interim findings are reported here; however the more complete analysis will be in a subsequent Problem Determination report to the agency. Collinear and oblique, frontal, offset crash testing, at different widths of overlap, has been conducted with a standard “bullet” car into several current model “target” cars at speeds of about 60 to 65 kmph for each car. Dummy injury measurements and structural responses provide a basis for determining the most severe impact environment. At present, the Hybrid III with additional instrumentation is the surrogate of choice.

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.

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.