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The report initially discuss the properties and application of tempered glass (TG) and laminated glass (LG) in motor vehicles. Although the trunk and extremities are injured these injuries are seldom life threatening. In contrast, head or neck injuries present a greater threat to life. Especially serious are TG injuries resulting in blindness. The resultant vehicle damage can appear not only as isolated glass cracking, which occurs regularly accompanying injuries without loss of consciousness, but as deformation of the vehicle interior adjacent to the windscreen. In the cases where more solid structures are impacted fatal injuries are possible. This report presents detail both of some real accident investigations and of 9 simulated oblique collisions using 9 post mortem human subjects (PMHS's). In these 9 simulations the head impacted during the primary impact phase against side windows constructed from TG. A modified tempered glass construction (two plates sandwiching a 3 mm air layer) was also tested. Impact angles were 35 to 45 degrees. The severity of facial laceration was dependent on collision severity, type of glass and glass damage resulting from head impact. Minor or severe cutting injuries of the face were caused. Only through the investigation of real accidents and accident simulations can occupant safety be improved.

A 20 year old woman with a severe head injury and rapidly increasing brain edema died 46 hours after the accident. There was clinical evidence of protracted shock and disseminated intravascular coagulation. The autopsy revealed a macro-embolization of brain tissue of the lungs with many central and intermediate lung artery branches occluded by cerebral tissue. Preconditions of the brain tissue embolism were a severe fracture of the skull including a traumatic rupture of the right sigmoid sinus, together with a local brain laceration and an extremely elevated intracranial pressure. Fibrin precipitations were prominent at the surfaces of the brain tissue emboli as well as in peripheral blood vessels of the lung; in the systemic circulation, intravascular coagulation was much less pronounced.