Accident studies show that incompatibility has become the main cause of fatal injury in car to car accidents. There is a general agreement today that improving compatibility is one of the most effective ways to reduce the number of road accident victims. Therefore, car design must take into account other road users without decreasing the self protection level supplied by all new passenger cars. In addition to these safety considerations, the front unit structural design has to account for an increasing number of constraints: improvement of real world performance in safety, fulfilling current and future regulations, reducing utilisation costs and so on. Furthermore, European fleet is changing in mass and in size, as is the world fleet, and new fashion vehicles differ from previous ones. This paper deals with the development of a more comprehensive approach in order to take into account safety requirements coming from real life accidents and the work done previously on understanding the physics of compatibility. The aim of this paper is to propose a better assessment procedure and a new test methodology in a standard approach for improving compatibility. For the covering abstract see ITRD E825082.
Abstract