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The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety installed a variety of infant, toddler, and booster restraints in vehicles subjected to high-speed frontal offset crash tests to assess the effects of severe crashes on the structural integrity of the restraints and their associated hardware (harnesses, buckles, clips, etc.). The child restraints were inspected before and after each test, and all damage was recorded. In some of the tests, forces and accelerations were recorded on the appropriate size child dummy properly secured in the child restraint. After a single severe crash, most restraints had sustained some damage, albeit minimal. Repeated tests indicated that these child restraints could withstand the forces of an additional crash with only minor additional damage. Dummy injury results suggest that current injury risk curves overstate the risk of neck injury to most properly restrained children.

The knee and ankle joint pivots of the Hybrid III dummy's leg are positioned in approximately the same orientation as the knee and ankle joint rotation centers of a human in a normal driving posture. However, the dummy's leg assembly is not simply a straight member between these two pivots. It is a zigzag-shaped solid link composed of one long straight section in the middle and short angled sections at either end, which form the pivots. The upper and lower tibia load cells are mounted on the straight middle section, making the upper tibia load cell location anterior to the line between the ankle and knee pivots and the lower tibia load cell location slightly posterior to the line between the pivots. Hence, an approximately vertical force on the foot can act along the line behind the upper tibia load cell and in front of the lower tibia load cell, creating bending moments.

This study, which is an extension of an earlier study, examined an additional 64 frontal crashes of airbag-equipped vehicles in the 1997-98 National Automotive Sampling System Crashworthiness Data System (NASS/CDS) in which the driver died. The principal cause of death in each case was determined based on an examination of the publicly available case materials, which primarily consisted of the crash narrative, the injury/source summary, and photographs of the crashed vehicle. Results were consistent with the earlier analyses of the 1990-96 NASS/CDS files. In the combined data set (1990-98), gross deformation of the occupant compartment was the leading cause (42 percent) of driver deaths in these 116 frontal crashes. The force of the deploying airbag (16 percent) and ejection from the vehicle (13 percent) also accounted for significant portions of the driver deaths in these frontal crashes. There continues to be little or no evidence that airbags deploy with too little energy.