At the Conference on Crashworthiness Ratings held in Lancaster, USA, in December 1980, a paper was presented by TRRL which proposed a new Crashworthiness Rating scheme. This attempted to weight the contributions of front and side barrier impacts and internal headform impact tests in proportion to the pattern of injury frequencies which occur in Great Britain. It assumed that car occupants were wearing seatbelts and that they were in cars of different model but broadly similar mass. On this basis the results of tests on twelve models of car were shown to give ratings which indicated marked differences in the probability of injury to occupants.

The present paper reports work carried out since then on this subject. The rating itself has been refined and now uses data from 40 measurements. Limited repeat testing on two models of car shows that the overall rating for a car is closely repeatable. It is suggested that the ratings should be expressed on a scale of from one to five stars, and that publication of these ratings would encourage manufacturers to compete in marketing safer designs.