A high level of crash safety performance is important to expand Fuel Cell Vehicle’s market acceptance. In addition to achieving equivalent crash safety performance to conventional gasoline and hybrid vehicles, it's also important task for manufacturer to consider and test FCVs specific issues. This will help users understand the crash safety performance of FCVs and hydrogen is similar to conventional gasoline and hybrid vehicles. In this paper, we report on two crash tests, the ‘Front Center Pole’ and ‘Rear Car to Car’ crash. Both of these crash tests were conducted during the development of the Clarity FCV in addition to regulation and third party evaluation crash tests. The ‘Front Center Pole’ crash is frontal crash that concentrates the impact in a way that locally deforms the front region of the vehicle, testing the protection of the fuel cell stack in severe frontal crashes. The ‘Rear Car to Car’ crash is rear-ending crash test where an actual bullet vehicle collides into the Clarity FCV using the FMVSS 301 test conditions for the purpose of testing the safety performance of the high-pressure hydrogen tank.

The ‘Front Center Pole’ crash is a frontal crash where the Clarity FCV impacts at 26kph a stationary pole at the vehicles front center axis. The ‘Rear Car to Car’ crash is rear end crash test using a mass production vehicle, in this case a Honda Legend Hybrid, as a bullet vehicle travelling at 80kph that strikes the rear of the Clarity FCV with a 70% overlap.

‘Front Center Pole’ crash test, we have confirmed there is no serious damage to the fuel cell stack and no hydrogen leakage. ‘Rear Car to Car’ crash, we have confirmed there is no serious damage to the high-pressure hydrogen tank and no hydrogen leakage.