One of the main objectives of the European TRACE project (Traffic Accident Causation in Europe, January 2006 – June 2008) was the development of methodology for the evaluation of the safety benefit of existing on-board safety applications in passenger cars with the use of mass accident data-bases only.

The challenge was to evaluate passive safety applications as well as active applications and especially combinations of the two within a single investigation. In order to do so the well known concept of odds-ratio has been generalized for jointly evaluating injury mitigating effectiveness as well as accident avoiding effectiveness at once.

This paper describes statistical sound methodology that is able to evaluate the safety benefit of either a single on-board safety function or the additional gain of specific safety feature(s) (i.e. a selection of various passive safety functions and active safety functions), given that some other safety applications already are on board. In particular, the method allows for evaluation of accident avoiding effectiveness as well as injury mitigating effectiveness. Hence, it can be applied for joint evaluations of passive and on-board active safety applications.

The focus of the paper lies on the presentation of a ready-to-apply methodology, including detailed examples as well as a discussion on its advantages and its limitations.