The vehicle safety and roadside safety communities utilize full-scale crash tests to assess the potential for occupant injury during collision loadings. While the vehicle community uses instrumented full-scale crash test dummies (ATDs), the roadside community relies on the flail space model and the Acceleration Severity Index (ASI) models, which are based primarily on the deceleration of the test vehicle. Unfortunately, there has been little research relating the roadside injury criteria to those used in the vehicle community. This paper investigates the correlation of these differing metrics to gain insight to potential differences in threshold occupant risk levels in the roadside and vehicle safety communities.

Full-scale vehicle crash tests are analyzed to compare the flail space model and ASI to ATD-based injury criteria for different impact configurations, including frontal and frontal offset crash tests. The Head Injury Criterion (HIC), peak chest acceleration, peak chest deflection, and maximum femur force are each compared to the ASI, and flail space parameters. With respect to the vehicle crash test injury criteria, the occupant impact velocity and ASI are found to be conservative in the frontal collision mode. The occupant ridedown acceleration appears to have the strongest correlation to HIC while the ASI appears to have the strongest correlation to peak chest acceleration.