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A historical review covering twenty-six years during which there were twenty-four meetings for field demonstrations and presentation of scientific papers. Twenty volumes of Proceedings were produced, consecutively numbered from Fifth to Twenth-Fifth from 1961 through 1981. The First Meeting was at Holloman Air Force Base on 17 May, 1955 in response to a request by Don Blanchard of the Society of Automotive Engineers for a tour of facilities and Field Demonstrations by the Aeromedical Field Laboratory relating to automotive crash research, for the benefit of the newly organized SAE Committee on Motor Vehicle Seat Belts and invited guests. The evolution of the Stapp Car Crash Conferences in terms of organization and program development is traced. Contributions to automotive safety research resulting from the Car Crash Conferences are discussed.

Human criteria for impact tolerance and survival are appropriate for standards in military and aviation space flight, when based on experiments with human volunteers representative of air and space flight crews. Automotive crash also involves pregnant females, infants, small children, the aged and infirm -- for humanitarian reasons excluded from painful and hazardous experiments. The automotive crash repertoire is limited to comparison with the variety and velocity of aerospace impact producing situations. An approach is suggested for standardizing vehicle crashes. On that basis, determining occupant exposure to crash forces then modulating exposure to within human tolerance and survival limits. This will expedite evolution of crash protection.