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The injury outcome of a front-front two-vehicle crash will be a function of crash-specific, vehicle-specific, and occupant-specific parameters. This paper focuses on a preliminary methodology that was used to evaluate the potential for benefits in making vehicle-specific changes to improve the compatibility of light vehicles across the fleet. In particular, the effect on injury rates of matching vehicle frontal stiffness was estimated. The front-front crash data for belted drivers in the lighter vehicles in the crash from ten years of NASS-CDS data were examined. The frontal stiffness of each vehicle was calculated using data taken during full frontal rigid barrier tests for the U.S. New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), and only crashes coded in the CDS as “no override” were considered.

The protection of a vehicle occupant in a frontal crash is a combination of vehicle front structural design and occupant restraint design. Once chosen and manufactured, these design features must interact with a wide variety of structural characteristics in potential crash partners. If robust, the restraint design will provide a high level of protection for a wide variety of crash conditions. This paper examines how robust a given restraint system is for occupant self-protection and how frontal design can improve the restraint performance of potential crash partners, thus improving their restraint robustness as well. To examine restraint robustness in self protection, the effect of various vehicle deceleration characteristics on occupant injury potential is investigated for a given restraint design. A MADYMO model of a 1996 Taurus interior and its restraint system with a Hybrid III 50th percentile male dummy are simulated and subjected to 650 crash pulses taken during 25 years of U.S.

This paper summarizes the results of an analysis of promising countermeasure systems for crossing path crashes, and thus provides a foundation for setting research priorities under the United States (U.S.) Department of Transportation’s Intelligent Vehicle Initiative. Crossing path crashes involve one moving vehicle cutting across the path of another, which amounted to 1.72 million police-reported crashes in the U.S. based on the 1998 General Estimates System crash database. Three basic countermeasure concepts and their functional requirements were developed to warn drivers of imminent collision caused by stop sign violation, red light violation, or insufficient gaps between vehicles at intersections or driveways. A survey was conducted to assess the technical viability of current systems and enabling technologies that could implement these concepts using infrastructure-based, vehicle-based, or cooperative vehicle-infrastructure systems.

This paper presents recent results of on-going research to build new maps of driver performance in car-following situations. The novel performance map is comprised of four driving states: low risk, conflict, near crash, and crash imminent - which correspond to advisory warning, crash imminent warning, and crash mitigation countermeasures. The paper addresses two questions dealing with the approach to quantify the boundaries between the driving states: (1) Do the quantified boundaries strongly depend on the dynamic scenario encountered in the driving environment? and (2) Do the quantified boundaries vary between steering and braking driver responses? Specifically, braking and steering driver performances are examined in two car-following scenarios: lead vehicle stopped and lead vehicle moving at lower constant speed.

This paper examines the feasibility of using four driving states (low risk, conflict, near crash, and crash imminent) to characterize lane-change driving performance. Data are analyzed from a test track study to estimate the boundaries between the states and to show that performance maps can be created for lane-change events in two simple scenarios. The map structure is further investigated using naturalistic on-road data and the agreement between the test track and on-road data models is discussed. Implications for crash counter-measure development and evaluation are discussed.

This paper describes the safety evaluation results from a Field Operational Test (FOT) of an Intelligent Cruise Control (ICC) system. The primary goal of this evaluation was to determine safety effects of the ICC system. Safety surrogate measures were established and examined for normal driving situations as well as for safety–critical situations. It was found that use of the ICC system in the FOT was generally associated with safer driving compared to manual control and is projected to result in net safety benefits if widely deployed.

This paper presents a driver performance map of braking and steering in response to three driving scenarios that lead to rear-end crashes. This map encompasses low risk, conflict, near-crash, and crash imminent driving states that correspond to advisory warning, crash imminent warning, and crash mitigation functionalities for intelligent vehicle rear-end crash countermeasures. Specifically, this paper models driver response to a lead vehicle decelerating by building upon prior research that estimated the state boundaries for driver response to lead vehicle stopped or moving at slower constant speed. In addition, this paper compares braking performance to steering performance in the lead vehicle-decelerating scenario using plots of range and range-rate that roughly quantify the boundaries between the driving conflict states. Driver performance is also discussed among the three rear-end crash scenarios.