This paper describes the development of a pedestrian head impact test procedure which can be applied to central hood regions of motor vehicles. Measurement details are given for locating fourteen impact points in areas where pedestrian head impacts occur and where good performance has been demonstrated on some, but not all, production vehicles. A uniaxial head impactor is used, and HIC values are calculated to evaluate performance.

The procedure was applied to a representative set of nine passenger cars and three light trucks. Percentages of central hood areas over which HIC did not exceed 1000 were determined. Some vehicles were found to provide good pedestrian head protection.

Underhood clearances were measured on a larger set of 36 vehicles (cars, light trucks, and vans) which represents the U.S. vehicle fleet. Based on these measurements, and on clearances measured under those impacts where HIC values were less than 1000 on the twelve-vehicle sample, it is concluded that with little or no additional research and development effort, head injury severity could be reduced in the U.S. by designing all vehicle hoods to have similar impact responses to those of the best performing production vehicles.