Trucks are involved in 25 to 30% of all fatal road traffic accidents in the European Community yearly. More than 50% of these fatalities appear to involve car occupants and about 20% truck occupants. The others include cyclists and pedestrians.

The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of recent research activities conducted at the TNO Crash-Safety Research Centre dealing with heavy truck safety. Three different accident types will be considered:​ the protection of truck occupants in a frontal collision, the protection of car passengers in head-on collisions with a truck and the protection of cyclists and pedestrians in contact with the side of a trailer.

For the first two accident types an integrated approach of testing and computer simulation was used in order to achieve an improved crash protection. In the car/truck frontal collision configuration this resulted in a prototype design for an energy-absorbing truck front underrun protection system. For the third accident type, computer simulations were conducted in order to study the potentials and limitations of possible design solutions.

Results of tests and simulations will be presented in this paper. Other results include insight into the validation level of the computer models used in this study and potential hardware solutions.