Publication

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the number of passenger cars equipped with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs), a development that affects the nature of future vehicle crashes. Predicting this change, understanding future crash frequencies and crash configurations and thereby deriving the most relevant load cases for occupant restraint systems, is key to ensuring future occupant protection. This study contributes by assessing how fully implementing today’s known ADASs in the future German car fleet will impact crash scenarios and crash configurations for modern passenger cars with occupants sustaining an at least moderate injury, 2 or higher, on the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS2+). Applying today’s known ADASs was found to decrease the number of such crashes markedly, but to increase the relative frequency of intersection crashes. These remaining intersection crashes were divided into distinct crash configurations. From this, five distinct and clearly defined load cases were identified to aid the development and evaluation of future occupant restraint systems. It must be noted, however, that these load cases are based on an analysis of a limited number of crashes.