The introduction of various vehicle safety standards and new car assessment programs in addition to automobile manufacturers' efforts to improve vehicle safety performance have led to significant improvements in vehicle safety performance over the past several years. Improving frontal impact compatibility is recognized as one approach to further enhancing vehicle safety performance. Various methods of improving frontal impact compatibilityhave been proposed and discussed. In 1996, European Enhanced Vehicle-safety Committee Working Group 15 on Vehicle Compatibility was established to explore methods for assessing vehicle compatibility and to develop procedures for testing it. In their 2007 Final Report, EEVC WG15 proposed a Progressive Deformable Barrier (PDB) test as one candidate for testing vehicle compatibility. The PDB test was developed with the aim of assessing and improving partner protection while taking self protection into account as well. This paper focuses on the PDB test. To assess its performance, severaldifferent category vehicles (small car, large car, midsize SUV, large SUV) were selected for study and PDB test results for them were compared withthose obtained with the current ECE R94 offset deformable barrier (ODB) test and the vehicle-to-vehicle impact test. This study was simply an attempt to make an evaluation of the PDB test in comparison with other test procedures. The full text of this paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0109.pdf For the covering abstract see ITRD E145407.
Abstract