This paper presents estimates of benefits resulting from the voluntary agreement by the motor vehicle manufacturers in the USA for enhancing compatibility in front-to-front collisions between light truck based vehicles and passenger cars. Two studies of accident data and one study based on crash tests are reported herein.
In addition, the members of the technical workgroup are researching methods to measure and predict the structural interaction of vehicles in crashes and to quantify their relative structural strength levels. Ongoing work on three parallel paths of research for improving vehicle compatibility is described in this paper - (a) full-width fixed deformable barrier with load cell wall approach; (b) CAE-based evaluations of vehicle to vehicle impacts; and (c) development of car surrogate mobile deformable barrier as a test device.