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Regulatory crash tests provide minimum performance standards for the safety of vehicles sold in the United States. In order to evaluate the similarity of real world crashes to crash tests, a method was developed to compare Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) crashes to crash tests for frontal and side impacts in a controlled, repeatable approach. The purpose of developing a new methodology was to enable future in-depth research on occupant injuries. Three parameter sets were compared for similarities: crash, vehicle, and occupant characteristics. Occupant injuries were compared with injury probabilities calculated from Anthropomorphic Test Devices (ATD). Two vehicle parameters, six crash parameters, and five occupant parameters were developed as comparison criteria while additional parameters were included only as supplemental information. CIREN contained in-depth crash and occupant injury information to make crash outcome comparisons possible.

Pedal misapplication (PM) crashes, i.e., crashes caused by a driver pressing one pedal while intending to press another pedal, have historically been identified by searching unstructured crash narratives for keywords and verified via labor-intensive manual inspection. This study proposes an alternative method to identify PM crashes using event data recorders (EDRs). Since drivers in emergency braking situations are motivated to hit the brake hard, it follows that drivers in emergency braking situations that commit a PM would likewise hit the accelerator hard, likely harder than accelerator pedal application during normal driving. Thus, the time-series accelerator pedal position and the derived accelerator pedal application rate were used to isolate accelerator misapplications. Additional strategic filters were applied based on characteristics observed from previous PM analyses to reduce false positive PM identifications.

Although computer simulation is regarded primarily as a tool for systems analysis, simulation can also be used in the process of systems optimization. This paper describes recent enhancements to a computer program package which enables the use of vehicle and occupant simulation models in determining the design of vehicles and restraints for maximum occupant impact protection. Also described is an application of this program package to determine the optimal design of a passenger vehicle involved in frontal collisions.

Pre-Crash Systems (PCS) integrate the features of active and passive safety systems to reduce both crash and injury severity. Upon detection of an impending collision, PCS can provide an early warning to the driver and activate automatic braking to reduce the crash severity for the subject vehicle. PCS can also activate the seatbelt pretensioners prior to impact. This paper identifies the opportunities for injury prevention in crash types for which PCS can be potentially activated. These PCS applicable crash types include rear-end crashes, single vehicle crashes into objects (trees, poles, structures, parked vehicles), and head-on crashes. PCS can benefit the occupants of both the striking and struck vehicle. In this paper, the opportunity for injury reduction in the struck vehicle is also tabulated. The study is based upon the analysis of approximately 20,000 frontal crash cases extracted from NASS / CDS 1997-2008.