The passive safety of passenger cars in frontal collisions is usually assessed by means of crash tests against a fiat or offset rigid barrier. In addition some institutes perform car-to-car tests;​ however, the effort involved is very high and the reproducibility is not as good.

Accident analyses show that in most of the frontal car-to-car collisions the stiffer zones such as the engine and the front-end structures do not overlap, thus affecting the softer zones of the impacting cars. Therefore, the amount of energy absorbed in both longitudinal members is relatively low.

For this reason and in order to increase the effort spent on a realistic frontal test procedure, Mercedes-Benz is extending its offset test program by a test against a deformable barrier.

Since the deformable element according to FMVSS 214 is well known and validated, this Honeycomb element was chosen for this purpose.

The force/deflection characteristics of this element represent the stiffness of the front end of a medium to full-size car.

First results show that the vehicle deformation patterns are very similar to those found in the course of real-world accidents. Another also very important result is that the degree of overlap does not greatly influence the load on the occupants, in contrast to the tests against a rigid offset barrier which are very sensitive to different degrees of overlap.