Against the background of upcoming intelligent safety systems, which also will have an impact on passive safety in general and on pedestrian safety in particular, all relevant technical measures have to be quantified in a combined way in order to find most effective solutions.

The article deals with the introduction of an assessment procedure called “Vehicle Related Pedestrian Safety - index” (VERPS-index). This test procedure is exemplarily applied to two very different cars. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the uplifting hood applied to the front of these two sample cars is quantified.

Our approach consists of four modules:​ accident analysis, numerical simulation of kinematic impact parameters, component tests, and quantification of pedestrian safety. Current European component tests use impact parameters which are set more or less independent of the vehicle shape [1]. We propose to use numerical simulations in order to generate vehicle shape dependent test parameters. A weighting procedure based on accident statistics is applied to evaluate the relevance of each tested point on the front of the vehicle regarding its actual impact probability in real life. Thus, the VERPS-index is able to solve many of the disadvantages of a conventional component test compared to a full-scale test.

Based on the VERPS-index we are able to show in detail how the pedestrian safety performance depends on the vehicle front shape and how it differs for adults and children. Technical measures like an uplifting hood can clearly improve the safety performance. However, their effectiveness strongly depends on the individual vehicle’s front geometry and differs for adults and children.