Pedestrian-vehicle accidents have become a peculiar urban problem that has to be solved in the future. This demands a better knowledge about the performance of pedestrian accidents. Tests using dummies to simulate real world accidents are very important to study the mechanism of impacts. Since only the dummy has been fitted with measuring devices like accelerometers, it is highly difficult to estimate the interaction between the dummy and the car to a fair degree of accuracy. Therefore, it is necessary to measure the body forces in addition to the dummy accelerations in order to explain the impact mechanism more precisely.

For this purpose, a body force measuring test vehicle has been developed at the Institute of Automotive Engineering, Berlin. A deformable unit which simulates the stiffness and geometrical measurements of a vehicle front is supported by load cells. The complete assembly is fixed on a very stiff chassis which allows to measure the resulting impact forces by magnitude and direction during the impact.

In this study two geometrical parameters (height and slope of the motor hood) have been varied to see their influence on the impact severity. The used front shape was a rounded pontoon type which is similar to small European cars. The results of some 20 test runs demonstrate that the described test installation is indeed a useful research instrument to study the influence of the design parameters of the car front on the impact performance and to evaluate their effect on the injury mechanism more precisely.