NHTSA’s recent test program on vehicle compatibility

Patel, Sanjay; Prasad, Aloke; Mohan, Pradeep

Affiliations

¹National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), United States

²The George Washington University, United States

Abstract

The objective of this study was to understand the structural interaction in frontal collisions between a compact passenger car and different Option 2 light truck based vehicles (LTVs).

Vehicle-to-vehicle (VTV) crash tests were conducted to understand how these new concepts perform. Full frontal VTV crash tests into Model Year(MY) 2002 Ford Focus were conducted with the MY2006 Ford F-250 secondary energy absorbing structure (SEAS) attached and with the SEAS removed. Full frontal VTV crash tests into Focus were also conducted with the MY2006 Honda Ridgeline and MY2007 Chevrolet Silverado with the SEAS attached only. Ridgeline and Silverado SEAS are fixed below the rails and can not be removed like F-250. The results of these tests are presented and discussed in this paper. The largest LTVs are being equipped with new frontal structures to prevent override with passenger cars and it cannot be properly evaluated with the current full frontal barrier test. A new instrumented rigid override barrier (ORB) concept has been developed to evaluate the strength of SEAS and tested for this purpose. This paper summarizes and discusses the design and testing of the ORB.

Furthermore, Finite Element (FE) models of MY2006 Ford F-250 and MY2007 Chevrolet Silverado were developed by the National Crash Analysis Center at the George Washington University under a contract with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The structural interaction in frontal collisions between a compact passenger car and the two LTVs was investigated using computer simulations.

Links

URL: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0416.pdf

Cited Works (1)

Year	Entry
2007	Patel S, Smith D, Prasad A, Mohan P. NHTSA’s recent vehicle crash test program on compatibility in front-to-front impacts. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Technical Conference on the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV). June 18-21, 2007; Lyon, France.

Cited By (1)

Year	Entry
2013	Stein M, Johannsen H, Thomson R. FIMCAR: influence of SEAS on frontal impact compatibility. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Technical Conference on the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV). May 27-30, 2013; Seoul, South Korea.