During the first decade of the 21st century, pedestrian safety in general was one of the main subjects of vehicle safety development. For the legform testing, the impactor developed by the European Enhanced Vehicle-Safety Committee was the standard impactor but experts from Japan introduced a new impactor, the so-called Flexible Pedestrian Legform Impactor (FlexPLI). The FlexPLI is capable to quantify the load of a human long bone, which is a significant advantage when developing vehicles with reduced bone fracture risk.

With the impactor being developed by a single company spare part availability was limited. In addition, potential improvement in terms of robustness in maximum load were identified. Therefore, a joint project was initiated, in which automobile manufacturers and their partners developed universal spare parts for the FlexPLI bone cores. These parts can withstand higher bending loads, are available from stock and do not need to be adapted to a specific legform. Furthermore, a reduction in variation of properties due to a different production process was achieved. This reduces performance variation within the legs and is comparable to the initial bone core mean performance. The document introduces the details of the project.