With the intention of studying design improvements, three frontal crash tests were run last year. The first test used a commercial, lightweight electric car. The second test used a reinforced version of the same car. The last test used a car based on a different structural design with a "hard-shell" car body. Crash tests showed that the latter solution made better use of the small zone available for continuous energy absorption. The paper discusses further the problemof frontal collisions between vehicles of different weight and, in particular, the side collision. A side-collision test was run with the hard-shell vehicle following the ECE lateral-impact test procedure at 50 km/h and led to results for the EuroSID1-dummy well below current injury tolerance criteria. (A) This study has also been published in a slightly different way in Accident Analysis and Prevention, Vol. 26 (1994), No. 3, p. 399-406.
Samenvatting