Citation

Gabler HC, Hollowell WT. Crash Prev. Injury Control 2000; 2(1): 19-31.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2000, Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine, Publisher Overseas Publishers Association - Gordon and Breach)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper investigates the compatibility of cars, light trucks, and vans (LTVs) involved in traffic crashes.  An analysis of U.S. crash statistics shows that, although LTVs currently account for approximately 1/3 of registered U.S. passenger vehicles, collisions between cars and LTVs account for over one half of all fatalities in light vehicle to vehicle crashes.  In these crashes, 81% of the fatally injured were found to be occupants of the car.  These statistics suggest that LTVs and passenger cars are incompatible in traffic crashes, and that LTVs are the more aggressive of the two vehicle classes.  The fundamental incompatibility between cars and LTVs is observed even when the analysis is restricted to collisions between vehicles of model year 1990 and later, indicating that, despite the availability of newer safety countermeasures, the incompatibility of cars and LTVs will persist in future fleets. The paper explores the design imbalances between cars and LTVs, e.g., mass, stiffness, and geometry, which lead to these severe crash incompatibilities.