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Car size in UK crashes: the effects of user characteristics, impact configuration and the patterns of injury

journal contribution
posted on 2006-04-04, 16:02 authored by Pete Thomas, Richard Frampton
Previous work examining the effect of vehicle mass has demonstrated the link with occupant injury severity. The principal factor has been related to Newtonian mechanics. This paper analyses data from the UK Co-operative Crash Injury Study and identifies other factors associated with car size. The mass of the car is found to have a predominant effect on injury outcome in frontal collisions only where the effect is seen most in injuries to the head, face and chest. Most fatal casualties in small cars die when in collision with another car in front or side collisions while the key group for large cars is frontal collisions with road-side objects. There are several characteristics of small car occupants that differ from those in large cars including gender, age and vehicle occupancy. New information in the analysis concerns the priorities in casualty reduction between small and large car occupants and the paper argues that vehicle design should take account of this variation to produce vehicles optimised for the complete range of crashes and car occupants.

History

School

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Pages

331185 bytes

Citation

THOMAS, P. and FRAMPTON, R., 2002. Car size in UK crashes: the effects of user characteristics, impact configuration and the patterns of injury. Travel Injury Prevention, 3(4), pp. 275-282.

Publisher

© Taylor and Francis

Publication date

2002

Notes

This article was published in the journal, Travel Injury Prevention [© Taylor and Francis] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15389580214631

ISSN

1538-9588

Language

  • en

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