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Crashworthiness focusses on occupant protection to reduce the number of fatal and serious injuries that occur in the United States each year. This research program is responsible for developing and upgrading test procedures for evaluating motor vehicle safety. Crashworthiness research encompasses new and improved vehicle design, safety countermeasures and equipment to enhance occupant safety.
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Alternative Energy
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Ensuring that alternative fuel vehicles attain a level of safety comparable to that of other vehicles requires extensive research, due to the many advanced and unique technologies that have previously not been tested in the transportation environment.
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Alternative Energy Research |
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Child Safety Crashworthiness
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Studies and reports providing an overview of the progress of child safety in the United States. This proves a summary of NHTSA's activities in promoting child safety, summarizes the agency's regulatory actions, and discusses issues regarding obstacles in the wide-spread use of booster seats.
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Child Safety Crashworthiness Research |
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Rear Seat Occupant Protection
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Front-row occupant protection in frontal crashes has benefited from recent developments in restraint performance and vehicle crashworthiness, which have been driven partly by manufacturers’ efforts to improve vehicle scores in consumer information tests. Occupants in the rear seat have not seen the same benefits their front seat counterparts. NHTSA is investigating different technologies to better understand the potential of these front seat technologies in the rear seat. |
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Rear Seat Occupant Protection in Frontal Crashes
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Small Overlap / Oblique Crashes
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Studies have shown that fatalities are still happen with vehicles equipped with safety belts and airbags in both small overlap and oblique crashes. Small overlap crashes are crashes with all the damage outside the main longitudinal. Oblique crashes engaged on of the main longitudinal member and caused the occupant to move in an oblique manner. Therefore, the agency is trying to develop test procedure to reduce fatalities and injuries in these two crash modes.
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Small Overlap / Oblique Program |
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School Bus Crashworthiness
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American students are nearly eight times safer riding in a school bus than with their own parents and guardians in cars. The fatality rate for school buses is only 0.2 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) compared to 1.5 fatalities per 100 million VMT for cars. This impressive safety record is a result of the Department of Transportation's requirements for compartmentalization on large school buses, and lap belts plus compartmentalization on small school buses.
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School Bus Crashworthiness Research
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Aggressivity and Fleet Compatibility
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The purpose of this research program is to investigate the problems of vehicle aggressivity and compatibility in multi- vehicle crashes. The near term goal is to identify and demonstrate the extent of the problem of incompatible vehicles in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions.
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Vehicle Aggressivity and Fleet Compatibility Research |
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Rollover
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The goal of the Agency's continuing research is to understand the vehicle and occupant kinematics pursuant to rollover initiation. Further, pre-crash elements might serve as important input parameters for the rollover crash reconstruction models."
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Rollover Research
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Truck Underride
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Current research into underride guard performance is focused on providing greater understanding of the characteristics of underride events and contributing factors, as well as providing next steps towards defining a computer model to evaluate underride guard designs and vehicle impacts.
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Truck Underride
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