The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has recently introduced a small overlap frontal crash test in its frontal rating scheme. Another small overlap frontal crash test is under development by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Whereas the IIHS test is conducted against a fixed rigid barrier, the NHTSA test is conducted with a moving deformable barrier that overlaps 35% of the vehicle being tested and the angle between the longitudinal axis of the barrier and the longitudinal axis of the test vehicle is 15 degrees. The field relevance of the IIHS test and the NHTSA test has been the subject of papers by Prasad et al. (2014a,b). The current study is aimed at examining the combined relevance of the two tests as representing frontal corner impacts involving small overlap. The field relevance is indicated by the frequency of occurrence of real world crashes that are simulated by the test conditions, the proportion of serious-to-fatal real world injuries explained by the test conditions, and rates of serious injury to the head, chest and other body regions in the real world crashes resembling the test condition. The database examined for real world crashes is NASS-CDS. The frontal corner impacts as represented by the 25% Small overlap frontal and the NHTSA tests together address slightly less than 9% of all frontal crashes and 6% to 12% of all MAIS3+F injuries to the drivers in these crashes. The IIHS test has a somewhat higher contribution in both the incidence and severity. The two crash modes together address 4.6% to 8.2% of all MAIS3+F head injuries. Similarly, the proportion of all frontal MAIS3+F chest injuries addressed by the two crash modes or corner tests is estimated to be 6% to 10.6%.

The available data for the passenger involved in driver-side frontal corner crashes indicate that elderly female occupants predominantly experience serious head and chest injuries. All, except one, injured passengers were females. The average age of injured females who had chest injuries was slightly over 65 years. Injury rates of the head and the chest are substantially lowered in far-side than in near-side frontal impacts. Crash test ATD rotational responses of the head in the tests substantially over predict the real world risk of serious-to-fatal brain injuries.