The risk of being injured with life threatening or permanently disabling consequences is higher in side impacts than in frontal impacts. Occupants sitting on the struck side receive twice as many injuries as occupants on the non-struck side. Improved protection in side impacts can be achieved with car body/door reinforcements and padding/airbag on inside of the door. When side impact protective systems are being developed, there is a need for an economical subsystem test method, that simulates full scale test conditions. This study presents a new test method, where a car door mounted on a sled impacts 3 test dummy. The method takes into account the two main injury causing factors in side impacts, the door to dummy impact speed and the velocity history of the door inner wall, which will determine the door to dummy displacement/overlap. The new test method is then used to evaluate the effect of the padding/airbag in the chest area and the padding in the pelvis area. The chest airbag results in generally lower loadings to the head, neck and chest than chest padding (50 mm) and significantly lower loading than a stiff reference door. Soft pelvis padding (75 mm thick) effectively reduces the pelvic loads. The best configuration, chest airbag and pelvis padding, gave a considerable improvement in 48 km/h (30 mph) as well as 32 km/h (20 mph) side impact tests.