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Current requirements for rear underride guards on large trucks are set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) 223 and 224. The standards have been in place since 1998, but their adequacy has not been evaluated apart from two series of controlled crash tests. The current study used detailed reviews of real-world crashes from the Large Truck Crash Causation Study to assess the ability of guards that comply with certain aspects of the regulation to mitigate passenger vehicle underride. It also evaluated the dangers posed by underride of large trucks that are exempt from guard requirements. For the 115 cases meeting the inclusion criteria, coded data, case narratives, photographs, and measurements were used to examine the interaction between study vehicles. The presence and type of underride guard was determined, and its performance in mitigating underride was categorized.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has recently developed and evaluated a new side impact barrier to represent the front profile of pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles for a new consumer information program. In the development of this program, two dummies were considered for assessing driver injury risk in side-struck vehicles: EuroSID-2 (50th percentile male dummy) and SID-IIs (5th percentile female dummy). The purpose of this study was to compare injury responses and kinematics for these two dummies in side impact crash tests. The findings suggest that SID-IIs will be more effective in driving relevant improvements in side impact crash protection.

The Maryland State Police, in cooperation with Saint-Gobain Vitrage and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, installed anti-lacerative Securiflex Inner Guard windshields in a number of their new vehicles. The exposure and visibility characteristics of these windshields have been monitored and compared to the experience of standard HPR windshields of similar vehicles in the fleet. The performance of the Securiflex windshields has shown visibility properties similar to standard windshields. More importantly, the superior safety characteristics of the Securiflex windshield prevented a Maryland State trooper from recieving lacerative injuries as the result of a collision in which his vehicle struck the rear of another vehicle.

This paper examines the effects that downsizing has had on occupant injury. Statistical models are derived which demonstrate the relative risks associated with downsized cars and restraint use. Then actual occupant injuries are analysed to show how the total pattern of occupant injuries changes with downsizing. Each additional thousand pounds of vehicle mass decreases the odds of a driver injury in a crash by 34 percent when the driver is not restrained. For restrained drivers, this decrease is 25 percent per thousand. Restraint use further decreases the odds of a driver injury by two-thirds. To gain the same reduction in injury odds afforded the belted driver of a 2500 pound passenger car, the unbelted driver requires a 4325 pound car. For unrestrained occupants, the instrument panel, steering assembly and windshield (in frontal impacts) are the most frequent sources of injury.