NHTSA's Recent Test Program on Vehicle Compatibility.

The objective of this study was to understand the structural interaction in frontal collisions between a compact passenger car and different Option2 light truck based vehicles (LTVs).ûVehicle-to-vehicle (VTV) crash testswere conducted to understand how these new concepts perform. Full frontalVTV crash tests into Model Year(MY) 2002 Ford Focus were conducted with the MY2006 Ford F-250 secondary energy absorbing structure (SEAS) attached and with the SEAS removed. Full frontal VTV crash tests into Focus were also conducted with the MY2006 Honda Ridgeline and MY2007 Chevrolet Silverado with the SEAS attached only. Ridgeline and Silverado SEAS are fixed below the rails and cannot be removed like F-250. The results of these tests are presented and discussed in this paper. The largest LTVs are being equipped with new frontal structures to prevent override with passenger cars and it cannot be properly evaluated with the current full frontal barrier test. A new instrumented rigid override barrier (ORB) concept has been developed to evaluate the strength of SEAS and tested for this purpose. This paper summarizes and discusses the design and testing of the ORB. Furthermore, Finite Element (FE) models of MY2006 Ford F-250 and MY2007 Chevrolet Silverado were developed by the National Crash Analysis Center at the GeorgeWashington University under a contract with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The structural interaction in frontal collisions between a compact passenger car and the two LTVs was investigated using computer simulations. The full text of this paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0416.pdf For the covering abstract see ITRD E145407.