In recent years, several major initiatives have been undertaken to assess relative vehicle occupant protection performance for consumer information. Two of these initiatives undertaken were the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), which measures relative occupant safety of current model vehicles by measuring dummy responses in controlled crash testing, and the Used Car Safety Ratings, which estimates the relative risk of severe driver injury for individual models of vehicles involved in real crashes by analysing mass data. This project assesses the relationship between NCAP test results and data from real crashes by comparing the results of crashworthiness ratings to the outcomes of NCAP testing for vehicle models whose relative occupant protection has been assessed in both programs. The analysis indicates a number of relationships between the results of NCAP testing and the outcomes of real crashes. Firstly, correlation analysis showed the results from offset NCAP testing have a much stronger association with real crash outcomes than do the results of full frontal NCAP testing. NCAP test results were also found to have the strongest association with the injury severity component of the crashworthiness rating which measures the risk of serious driver injury given any injury. (A)
Samenvatting