Light trucks and vans (LTV's), developed originally for utility purposes, are now being used also for recreational and ordinary transportation purposes. The efforts of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to look at the safety of these vehicles will be discussed.

This paper is in three parts:​ Accident statistics, crashworthiness of production vehicles, and automatic restraint systems.

In part one, data from the National Crash Severity Study is used to describe the accident environment of these vehicles. Frontal impact fatalities and serious injuries make up a large portion of the total LTV's occupant injury distributions.

In part two, levels of crashworthiness are described for production cars and LTV's in actual 30-mph frontal barrier crashes. Mini-pickup trucks and vans are the only vehicle classes which have average injury criteria values higher than those allowed by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 208.

In part three, in the area of frontal impact protection, work is progressing on (1) automatic belts for the VW Rabbit mini-pickup, (2) air bags for the Chevrolet C-10 standard-pickup, and (3) air bags for the Ford E-150 van. The views stated herein are strictly those of the authors and should not be construed as indicating any official NHTSA position.