Citation

Crandall JR, Martin PG, Sieveka EM, Pilkey WD, Dischinger PC, Burgess AR, O'Quinn TD, Schmidhauser CB. Accid. Anal. Prev. 1998; 30(5): 667-677.

Affiliation

University of Virginia, Automobile Safety Laboratory, Charlottesville 22902, USA. jrc2h@virginia.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 1998, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

9678220

Abstract

This article examines two observational and two experimental data sets that emphasize lower limb injuries in passenger car crashes. Statistics show that 60% of moderate-to-severe below-knee injuries sustained by front seat occupants in head-on crashes occur with > 3 cm of footwell intrusion. Moreover, crash tests and computer simulations of car-to-car frontal offset collisions show no causal relationship between the magnitude of footwell intrusion and the axial load measured in the dummy leg. This article correlates below-knee injuries with several factors that influence their frequency and severity, such as the vehicle change in velocity, the magnitude of footwell intrusion, the rate and timing of the intrusion and the size of the vehicle. The vehicle change in velocity and the intrusion rate and timing had the greatest influence on the risk of lower limb injury, while the other factors had much less of an effect.