Annually within the European Union, there are over 40,000 road accident fatalities and 1.6 million other casualties and the majority of these are either the occupants of cars or are in collision with a car. The European Commission now has competency for vehicle-based injury countermeasures through the Whole Vehicle Type Approval system. As a result of this, the Commission has recently recognised that casualty reduction strategies must be based on a full understanding of the real-world accident data in conditions broadly representative of the European Union and that vehicle safety countermeasure effectiveness must be properly evaluated.

To this effect, a new study known as PENDANT (short for Pan-European Co-ordinated Accident and Injury Databases) commenced in January 2003. This study is developing a co-ordinated set of targeted, in-depth crash data resources to support European Union vehicle and road safety policy. Over the course of the next three years, around 1100 investigations of crashes involving injured car occupants will be conducted in eight EU countries to a common protocol. The data will be further enhanced by the linking of hospital and police information to provide additional data on the trends and injury patterns of over 60,000 road users of all types.

This paper describes the methodology and purposes of the study and expected impact within the European Union. It is expected that the end result of the study will be a co-ordinated system to inform European vehicle safety policy in a systematic integrated manner. Furthermore, the results of the data analyses will provide new directions to develop injury countermeasures and regulations.