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It has been proposed that low speed collisions in which the damage is isolated to the bumper systems can be reconstructed using data from customized quasistatic testing of the bumper systems of the involved vehicles. In this study, 10 quasistatic bumper tests were conducted on 7 vehicle pairs involved in front-to-rear collisions. The data from the quasistatic bumper tests were used to predict peak bumper force, vehicle accelerations, velocity changes, dynamic combined crush, restitution, and crash pulse time for a given impact velocity. These predictions were compared to the results measured by vehicle accelerometers in 12 dynamic crash tests at impact velocities of 2 - 10 mph. The average differences between the predictions using the quasistatic bumper data and the dynamic crash test accelerometer data were within 5% for bumper force, peak acceleration, and velocity change, indicating that the quasistatic bumper testing method had no systematic bias compared to dynamic crash testing.

There is a paucity of recent data quantifying the injury risk of forces and accelerations that act on the whole body in a back-to-front direction. The purpose of this study was to quantify the level of back-to-front accelerations that volunteers felt were tolerable and non-injurious. Instrumented volunteers were dropped supine onto a mattress, and their accelerations during the impact with the mattress were measured. Accelerometers were located on the head, upper thoracic and lower lumbar regions. Drop heights started at 0.6 m (2 ft) and progressed upward as high as 1.8 m (6 ft) based on the test subjects' consent. The test panel was comprised of male and female subjects whose ages ranged from 25 to 63 years of age and whose masses ranged from 62 to 130 kg (136 to 286 lb). Peak head, upper thoracic and lower lumbar accelerations of 25.9 g, 29.4 g and 39.6 g were measured.

The longitudinal motion of the head, thorax and lumbar spine of two test subjects was measured in low-speed rear-end collisions in order to understand the effect of the head-to-head restraint distance (backset) on the occupant kinematics. The two test subjects were exposed to three rear-end impacts at two crash severities, nominal changes in velocity (ΔV) of 1.11 (low ΔV) and 2.22 m/s (high ΔV). The backset was hypothesized to be an independent variable that would affect the head and neck motion and was set at 0, 5 or 10 cm. The x and z-axis accelerations of the impacted vehicle and the anatomical x and z-axis accelerations of each test subjects’ upper thorax and L5-S1 region were measured and then transformed to an earth-based coordinate system. Head accelerations were measured at the mouth and these accelerations were transformed to an earth-based coordinate system at the head center of gravity (CG).