Increasingly stringent international passenger safety norms and the need to reduce vehicle body weight for environmental and protection requirements demand efficient and innovative design methods. Computer simulation, or virtual testing, allows an integrated evaluation of these aspects in the early design stages and thereby reduces costs for prototyping and time-to-market.

This paper deals with the application of virtual testing in vehicle passive safety design to:​ (1) reduce injury numbers by enhancing passive safety for a wide range of conditions, and (2) reduce the duration and costs of the vehicle design by improving the efficiency of the design process.

Asoftware tool, called ADVISER, was developed to facilitate the use of virtual testing in automotive safety design and regulations. ADVISER contains the following modules:​ 1) procedures and guidelines to standardise and rate numerical models and simulations;​ 2) stochastic modelling to accounting for the experimentally observed scatter in simulations;​ and 3) a validated virtual test procedure to extend the range of protection beyond current regulations to real life crash conditions. All steps needed for acceptance of this virtual test procedure in regulations or in a consumer test method will be taken into account.