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Established in 1997, the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) provides consumers with a safety performance assessment for the majority of the most popular cars in Europe. Thanks to its rigorous crash tests, Euro NCAP has rapidly become an important driver safety improvement to new cars. After ten years of rating vehicles, Euro NCAP felt that a change was necessary to stay in tune with rapidly emerging driver assistance and crash avoidance systems and to respond to shifting priorities in road safety. A new overall rating system was introduced that combines the most important aspects of vehicle safety under a single star rating. The overall rating system has allowed Euro NCAP to continue to push for better fitment and higher performance for vehicles sold on the European market. In the coming years, the safety rating is expected to play an important role in the support of the roll-out of highly automated vehicles.

Over the last decades, the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) has become synonymous with crash testing and safety ratings. During this period, the total road death toll in EU-28 has been reduced by roughly a quarter, despite a significant growth in road traffic volumes (ETSC, 2011). One important factor is that cars in Europe have become much safer, due to vehicle safety regulations and industry’s response to initiatives such as Euro NCAP.

International audience

International audience

One of the current activities of EEVC Working Group 13 (WG-13) "Side Impact Test Procedures" is to develop a test procedure for Free Motion Head impact tests supplementary to the full-scale mobile deformable barrier (MDB) test specified in ECE Regulation 95. Amongst the factors needed for development of the test procedure, is the determination of "worst case" test conditions for specifying contact point and approach angle. The goal of this research project was to give an objective prediction of head impact location, related head impact angle and impact speed for small, average and large sized belted front occupants in realistic seating positions in a wide range of side impact crash scenarios. Head contact at A-pillar, B-pillar and Roof-rail in two vehicle types (light / heavy) and for different interior dimensions were studied. The prediction of head impact location, velocity and angle was realized by means of virtual testing using MADYMO. Simple but efficient multi-body vehicle models were used in combination with human body models. In this study head impact horizontal and vertical angles were found between 50 deg and 115 deg and between -35 deg and -5 deg respectively. The corresponding head impact velocities were between 3 and 9 m/s, with an average value of 6.7 m/s.

International audience

18th ESV - International Technical Conference on the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles, NAGOYA, JAPON, 19-/05/2003 - 22/05/2003; The frontal crash is still important contributor to deaths and serious injured resulting from road accidents in Europe. As the hybrid iii dummy used in crash tests is over two decades old, the European enhanced vehicle safety committee is studying the potential for a new test device. Key is the availability of a well defined set of requirements that identifies the minimum level of biofidelity required for an advanced frontal dummy. In this paper, a complete set of frontal impact biofidelity requirements, consisting of references, description of test conditions and corridors, is presented.

The Q-series of child dummies is a new family of advanced child dummies covering the complete child population up to 12 years. The 'Q-series' design is not only advanced in terms of its biomechanical basis, it is also developed to be used in both front and side impact making it the first 'multi-directional' series of (child) dummies. This paper presents the functional targets for the Q-series,a set of biomechanically based design and performance targets for a 3-year-old dummy and the validation of the prototype version of the 3-year-old-Q-dummy- the Q3.

For the determination of material parameters, it is a common practice to extract specimens with well-defined geometries. The design of the samples and the choice of the applied load are meant to lead to a homogeneous stress and strain distribution in a part of the sample. When applied to biological materials, this raises a number of problems: homogeneous strains cannot be obtained because the materials have inhomogeneous properties, and the manufacturing of samples is hard or sometimes impossible. In this technical note a different approach is presented, based on the use of a digital image technique for the measurement of nonhomogeneous strain distributions, finite element modeling and the use of a minimum-variance estimator. The method is tested by means of experiments on an orthotropic elastic membrane of a woven and calendered textile. Five parameters are identified using the experimental data of one single experiment.

This paper summarises the main design improvements and gives the results of the dummy evaluation program carried out on behalf of the working group