In 2009, 2,222 people were killed and 24,690 were seriously injured in road traffic accidents in Great Britain (GB). About half the people killed were car occupants and just over one third of these were killed in side impacts.

Over the past ten years, since the introduction of the side impact regulation in Europe, much research work has been performed internationally to develop new and modified test procedures to improve the level of occupant protection offered by vehicles in side impacts. In Europe, this research has been co-ordinated by the European Enhanced Vehicle safety Committee (EEVC) and focused on contributing to the development of WorldSID and three test procedures. These are an Advanced European Deformable Barrier (AE-MDB) test, a pole test and an interior headform test.

This paper describes work performed by TRL on behalf of the UK Department for Transport to inform UK policy regarding side impact protection and provide the UK contribution to EEVC activities. The work described consisted of two parts.

For the first part, three full-scale crash tests were performed with Euro NCAP 5 star rated cars to investigate the implications of an AE-MDB test at a higher test speed than the current 50 km/h, in particular how much the occupant protection level in a current vehicle would have to be improved to meet the requirements of such a test and how representative the AE MDB is of a car at these higher speeds. The tests performed indicated that the safety level of a current Euro NCAP 5 star rated car is close to being able to meet the current UNECE Regulation 95 requirements in a 60 km/h AE-MDB test, but would need substantial modifications for higher speeds. Also, several issues were highlighted which need to be considered further. These included (1) the suitability of the current barrier face, because it was very close to bottoming out in the test performed, and (2) the appropriateness of the ES-2 dummy, because of the particularly high T12 spine loads recorded, which indicated that it may not have behaved in a biofidelic manner in the test performed. For the second part, component level pendulum tests were performed with a WorldSID to assess the RibEye system, in particular to compare the RibEye measured deflection with the deflections that would be obtained using a 1D or 2D IR-Tracc sensor and to gain information on the best position for the two off-axis LEDs used with RibEye. In addition, a 60 km/h AE-MDB test was performed with a WorldSID 50th percentile driver and 5th percentile rear passenger to compare the performance of the WorldSID with the ES-2 dummy and to provide a further assessment of the RibEye system. It was found that the RibEye system was integrated well into the WorldSID and, in general, worked well. However, a potential issue was identified with the shoulder rib deflection measurement. This and other findings are discussed further in the paper.