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EDR's were first installed in 1994 and are now installed in 99% of new light vehicles sold in the US. In the US EDR’s are not required, but vehicles with EDR’s made after 9/1/2012 must meet minimum standardized content requirements of 49 CFR, Part 563 including speed, throttle, brake on/off and Delta V.  Data must be retrievable with a publicly available tool.  Only a few manufacturers install EDR’s worldwide currently, but the EU and China are adopting regulations to require them in the next few years.  

Many technical projects, most vehicle and component testing, and all accident reconstructions, product failure analyses, and other forensic investigations, require photographic documentation. Roadway evidence disappears, tested or wrecked vehicles are repaired, disassembled, or scrapped, and components can be tested for failure. Photographs are frequently the only evidence that remains of a wreck, or the only records of subjects before or during tests. Making consistently good images during any inspection is a critical part of the evaluation process. 

Crash reconstruction is a scientific process that utilizes principles of physics and empirical data to analyze the physical, electronic, video, audio, and testimonial evidence from a crash to determine how and why the crash occurred. This course will introduce this reconstruction process as it gets applied to various crash types - in-line and intersection collisions, pedestrian collisions, motorcycle crashes, rollover crashes, and heavy truck crashes. Methods of evidence documentation will be covered. Analysis methods will also be presented for electronic data from event data recorders and for video.

Safety continues to be one of the most important factors in motor vehicle design, manufacturing, and marketing.  This course provides a comprehensive overview of these critical automotive safety considerations: injury and anatomy; human tolerance and biomechanics; occupant protection; testing; and federal legislation. The knowledge shared at this course enables participants to be more aware of safety considerations and to better understand and interact with safety experts. This course has been approved by the Accreditation Commission for Traffic Accident Reconstruction (ACTAR) for 18 Continuing Education Units (CEUs).

Photographs and video recordings of vehicle crashes and accident sites are more prevalent than ever, with dash mounted cameras, surveillance footage, and personal cell phones now ubiquitous. The information contained in these pictures and videos provide critical information to understanding how crashes occurred, and  analyze physical evidence. This course teaches the theory and techniques for getting the most out of digital media, including correctly processing raw video and photographs, correcting for lens distortion, and using photogrammetric techniques to convert the information in digital media to usable scaled three-dimensional data.

Investigating human driver behavior enhances the acceptance of the autonomous driving and increases road safety in heterogeneous environments with human-operated and autonomous vehicles. The previously established driver fingerprint model, focuses on the classification of driving style based on CAN bus signals. However, driving styles are inherently complex and influenced by multiple factors, including changing driving environments and driver states. To comprehensively create a driver profile, an in-car measurement system based on the Driver-Driven vehicle-Driving environment (3D) framework is developed. The measurement system records emotional and physiological signals from the driver, including ECG signal and heart rate. A Raspberry Pi camera is utilized on the dashboard to capture the driver's facial expressions and a trained convolutional neural network (CNN) recognizes emotion. To conduct unobtrusive ECG measurements, an ECG sensor is integrated into the steering wheel.

As part of the safety validation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving (AD) functions, it is necessary to demonstrate that the frequency at which the system exhibits hazardous behavior (HB) in the field is below an acceptable threshold. This is typically tested by observation of the system behavior in a field operational test (FOT). For situations in which the system under test (SUT) actively intervenes in the dynamic driving behavior of the vehicle, it is assessed whether the SUT exhibits HB. Since the accepted threshold values are generally small, the amount of data required for this strategy is usually very large. This publication proposes an approach to reduce the amount of data required for the evaluation of emergency intervention systems with a state machine based intervention logic by including the time periods between intervention events in the validation process.

The optimization and further development of automated driving functions offers great potential to relieve the driver in various driving situations and increase road safety. Simulative testing in particular is an indispensable tool in this process, allowing conclusions to be drawn about the design of automated driving functions at a very early stage of development. In this context, the use of driving simulators provides support so that the driving functions of tomorrow can be experienced in a very safe and reproducible environment. The focus of the acceptance and optimization of automated driving functions is particularly on vehicle lateral control functions. As part of this paper, a test person study was carried out regarding manual vehicle lateral control on the dynamic vehicle road simulator at the Institute of Automotive Engineering.

This title includes the technical papers developed for the 2023 Stapp Car Crash Conference, the premier forum for the presentation of research in impact biomechanics, human injury tolerance, and related fields, advancing the knowledge of land-vehicle crash injury protection. The conference provides an opportunity to participate in open discussion about the causes and mechanisms of injury, experimental methods and tools for use in impact biomechanics research, and the development of new concepts for reducing injuries and fatalities in automobile crashes.

This course introduces basic tire mechanics, including tire construction components based on application type, required sidewall stamping in accordance with DoT/ECE regulations, tread patterns, regulatory and research testing on quality, tire inspections and basic tire failure identification. The course will provide you with information that you can use immediately on-the-job and apply to your own vehicle. This course is practical in nature and supplemented with samples and hands-on activities.

Dampers (PDs) are passive devices employed in vibration and noise control applications. They consist of a cavity filled with particles that, when fixed to a vibrating structure, dissipate vibrational energy through friction and collisions among the particles. These devices have been extensively documented in the literature and find widespread use in reducing vibrations in structural machinery components subjected to significant dynamic loads during operation. However, their application in reducing vehicle interior sound has received, up to now, relatively little attention. Previous work by the authors has proven the effectiveness of particle dampers in mitigating vibrations in vehicle body panels, achieving a notable reduction in structure-borne noise within the vehicle cabin with an additional weight comparable to or even lower than that of bituminous damping treatments traditionally used for this purpose.

From an NVH perspective, electric vehicles represent a great opportunity since the noise of the combustion engine, dominant in many driving conditions, is no longer present. On the other hand, drivers accustomed to driving cars with a strong personality (for example typically sporty ones) may perceive "silence" as a lack of character. Our internal study, conducted with a jury of people, has in fact already shown that for half of customers silence should characterize BEV vehicles; but, at the same time, the other half of the jury expects feedback from the vehicle while driving. The silence inside the passenger compartment, from an NVH point of view, can therefore be compared to a blank sheet of paper, on which, if desired, sounds designed to satisfy the driving pleasure expected by the customer can be introduced.

The structure-, fluid- and air-borne excitation generated by HVAC compressors can lead to annoying noise and low frequency vibrations in the passenger compartment. These noises and vibrations are of great interest in order to maintain high passenger comfort of EV vehicles. The main objective of this paper is to develop a numerical model of the HVAC system and to simulate the structure-borne sound transmission from the compressor through the HVAC hoses to the vehicle in a frequency range up to 1 kHz. An existing automotive HVAC system was fully replicated in the laboratory. Vibration levels were measured on the compressor and on the car body side of the hoses under different operational conditions. Additional measurements were carried out using external excitation of the compressor in order to distinguish between structure- and fluid-borne transmission. The hoses were experimentally characterised with regard to their structure-borne sound transmission characteristics.

This class will provide the student with the skills, knowledge, and abilities to interpret, analyze and apply HVEDR data in real-world applications. This course has been designed to build on the concepts presented in the SAE course Accessing and Interpreting Heavy Vehicle Event Data Recorders (ID# C1022). Advanced topics will include associating HVEDR data with collision events through timestamps, odometer logs, and data signatures, validating HVEDR speed data using specified vehicle parameters, performing time and distance analyses using HVEDR data, and correlating HVEDR data to physical evidence from the vehicle and roadway.