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The Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies (ACAT) program initiated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had two major overall objectives. These were to develop a standardized Safety Impact Methodology (SIM) tool to evaluate the effectiveness of advanced technologies in avoiding and mitigating specific types of vehicle crashes; and to develop and demonstrate objective tests that are used in the SIM to verify the safety impact of a real system. Honda and Dynamic Research Inc. (DRI) had been developing and applying such SIMs for several years and had a Cooperative Agreement with NHTSA to further develop a SIM in order to determine the feasibility of developing estimates of effectiveness for specific not-yet-deployed safety technologies in the absence of data from real world or field operational tests, and linking it to the results from objective tests.

Preliminary results of a study to develop lateral-directional handling test procedures for motorcycles are presented. One is a steady-state turn, accomplished with a range of forward speeds and turn radii. The other is a single lane change maneuver, using various degrees of severity and forward speeds. Several example motorcycles were studied analytically and via full scale tests. Data from onboard instrumentation show the effects of vehicle and operational differences on selected response and performance measures. This paper comprises a progress report, and the work is continuing.

Motorcycle braking test procedures and results are presented. Both straight line and combined cornering and braking maneuvers were used. Test conditions included various initial speeds, turn radii, surface skid numbers, and levels of braking effort for two instrumented motorcycles. The effect of braking on transient yaw response in turns is demonstrated, also. Overall, the results show that repeatable safety related response and performance measures can be obtained using the prescribed procedures with expert test riders.