Crash Worthiness

Crashworthiness is the quality a vehicle has to prevent the occupants from becoming injured if a collision takes place. It focuses on what could happen if the driver and passengers in the car are thrown against its interior, and the cause of the collision itself is generally felt to be somewhat irrelevant in such a case. The main consideration here is that the vehicle lacked some feature that could have lessened or prevented the riders’ injuries, indicating that the manufacturer is liable for damages.

Note that crashworthiness has a narrower scope that the umbrella term “vehicle safety,” which also includes the accident-avoidance features a car may have, including wider tires and antilock brakes. Its crashworthiness features—such as seat belts, headrests, side-impact protection, crumple zones, and roll bars—are intended to keep occupant injuries at a minimum. They are also designed to prevent ejection of the riders from the vehicle and lessen the possibility of the car catching fire in the event of an accident.

Crashworthiness and the Law

Such cases, which often lead the victims to consult an attorney or become part of a class action suit, usually involve injuries that a client has sustained because the vehicle in question is defective in some way. These defects fall into three distinct categories:

1. An occupant is injured because of a flaw in the production process, e.g., failure to install an airbag, even when the original design specifically called for it.

2. An occupant is injured because the manufacturer’s design of the vehicle is defective, such as placing the gas tank where it can easily explode in a collision.

3. An occupant is injured because the manufacturer is aware that the vehicle is dangerous to drive in some respect, but fails to take the necessary steps to inform owners of the possible hazard.

Testing the Crashworthiness of a Vehicle

When this is done prospectively, computer models or experiments are used, and when it is done retrospectively, an analysis of crash outcomes is performed. The former method includes studying patterns of the car’s structure, the acceleration that took place during a collision, and the use of human body replicas to predict the possibility of injury to riders. The latter method is quite complex and often involves the use of statistical techniques, such as regression, to pinpoint the exact cause of the victims’ injuries after being involved in an accident.

The dummies used in crash tests are full-scale devices that simulate the measurements, movements, and weight of the human body. As a rule, they are also instrumented to provide data about the device’s reaction to simulated vehicle impacts—including the speed of the impact, the torque, folding, or bending of the device, crushing force, and deceleration rates during a collision. In order to aid compliance with Global Technical Regulations (GTR) and United States requirements, such dummies are also used in automotive design to help ensure the crashworthiness and safety of the vehicle before it is put on the market.