Citation

Huang H, Hu S, Zheng L. Int. J. Crashworthiness 2014; 19(6): 613-623.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/13588265.2014.931540

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Various studies have been conducted concerning vehicles' crashworthiness and crash aggressivity. This paper aims to propose a crash-level approach to combine motor vehicles' crashworthiness and crash aggressivity into an integrated index, which is expressed as the total secondary safety index (TSSI). A Bayesian ordered logit model was proposed to estimate the TSSI for 23 major passenger-car brands in Florida. This model could explicitly define the crashworthiness of subject vehicles while taking into account the aggressivity to the counterpart vehicles which are involved in the same crashes. A total of 17,178 two-vehicle-crash records involving 34,356 cars in Florida were utilised to identify the variations regarding the TSSI of 23 major passenger-car brands. Through the Bayesian ordered logit model, it is found that some luxury car brands such as Cadillac, Lexus and Volvo show excellent total secondary safety compared with the average level. Moreover, each car brand is set up as the reference case to cross-compare with the other 22 brands with significance tests on their differences, and results show that most brands exhibit statistical significance when several car brands are selected as the reference cases. The TSSIs of several car brands such as Cadillac and Volvo are significantly better than those of the rest of the brands. Through comparing the ranks of crashworthiness index, crash aggressivity index and the TSSI, it is found that the total secondary safety is more correlated with crashworthiness than crash aggressivity.