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A major focus of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) vehicle compatibility and aggressivity research program is the development of a laboratory test procedure to evaluate compatibility. This paper is written to explain the associated goals, issues, and design considerations and to review the preliminary results from this ongoing research program. One of NHTSA's activities supporting the development of a test procedure involves investigating the use of an mobile deformable barrier (MDB) into vehicle test to evaluate both the self-protection (crashworthiness) and the partner-protection (compatibility) of the subject vehicle. For this development, the MDB is intended to represent the median or expected crash partner. This representiveness includes such vehicle characteristics as weight, size, and frontal stiffness. This paper presents distributions of vehicle measurements based on 1996 fleet registration data.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is conducting a research program to investigate the use of the 40 percent offset deformable barrier (ODB) crash test procedure to reduce death and injury, in particular debilitating lower extremity injuries in frontal offset collisions. This paper presents the results of 22 ODB crash tests conducted with 50th percentile male and 5th percentile female Hybrid III (HIII) dummies fitted with advanced lower legs, Thor-Lx/HIIIr and Thor-FLx/HIIIr, to assess the potential for debilitating and costly lower limb injuries. This paper also begins to investigate the implications that the ODB test procedure may have for fleet compatibility by evaluating the results from vehicle-to-vehicle crash tests.