Nowadays, limit values of mechanical quantities which are measured with dummies are used as passenger protection criteria during development and design approval tests on vehicles. These limits are based mainly on experiments with animals or corpses.

A method which shows a direct relationship to real accident phenomena is applied to validate the biomechanical limit values which, up to now, are only roughly or partly known. In this method, correlations between passenger stress values and the severity of injuries in real accidents are determined for passengers wearing safety belts in frontal and lateral collisions on the basis of Equivalent Accident Characteristics by experimental tests, simulation calculations and statistical evaluation of carefully documented real accidents. The relationship between the severity of injuries and the mechanical load thus obtained enables the relevant dummy protection criteria to be determined il a simple manner while taking into account predetermined injury criteria (e.g. AIS 3). It becomes clear that the method for the validation of protection criteria presented here can be extended in depth (with regard to the method) as well as in latitude (with regard to other types of accident) by the combination of

• experimental and computer simulation and of
• real accident data.