Citation

Richter B, Jaehn N, Sinnhuber R, Stender C, Zobel R, Zogalla G. Proc. Int. Tech. Conf. Enhanced Safety Vehicles 1995; 1995: 622-640.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1995, In public domain, Publisher National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Growing environmental awareness and the desire to preserve fossil fuels have in the recent past caused some automobile manufacturers and a couple of small development teams to consider whether this goal can be achieved through, amongst other things, extremely small and light vehicles. Because of the low weight, the problem of compatibility - that is to say the affect of a collision with a larger vehicle - becomes particularly acute. In addition, the requirement that such vehicles are built as compact as possible contradicts the desire to include conventional deformation zones in the design. The question arises whether such a vehicle should be consciously built with lower standards of passive safety or what expense would be necessary to at least partially compensate these physical handicaps. It has been shown that through consequent application of a series of complementary measures, and by using the total physically available space, a thoroughly respectable safety potential can be achieved for small vehicles. However, decreased deformation length of smaller vehicles increases the deformation forces and the mass of the vehicle. Therefore, extremely short vehicles are not necessarily light vehicles.