Pedestrial accidents protection

 How do you make cars safer for pedestrians?

 Traditionally, vehicle safety has tended to focus on improving the protection that a car can offer to an occupant, but vehicles can also be designed to be safer for pedestrians if an accident occurs. Pedestrian protection is achieved by designing the front of a vehicle so that pedestrians and other vulnerable road users are less likely to be injured if they are hit, and European legislation, Pedestrian Protection Regulation 78/2009, has now been introduced to ensure that all cars offer some level of protection. This legislation is expected to amended during 2018. It will never be possible to design car fronts so that they do not injure pedestrians in all circumstances, but there is much more that can be done to change the shape and the stiffness of car fronts so that injuries are less likely and less severe. The changes in the shape of many modern vehicle fronts, compared to older vehicles, has been influenced by pedestrian protection. In general, vehicle designs can be modified to protect pedestrians by increasing the crush depth between the outer surface of the vehicle and hard objects underneath (such as engine parts), and also by modifying the stiffness of the vehicle's structure below the outer surface so that in an impact it absorbs as much energy as possible without causing injury. An organisation called EuroNCAP has been conducting crash tests on cars for around 20 years. The cars that they test are given star ratings for the level of occupant and pedestrian protection that the car offers, and most manufacturers try to achieve the highest rating possible when designing their cars. Whilst the ratings for vehicle occupants have been steadily increasing, improvements in pedestrian protection have been less rapid - the majority of cars achieve less than half marks.

How can you test how safe a car front is? 

There are many different approaches that can be taken. One manufacturer has developed their own pedestrian crash test dummy so that they can replicate what would happen in a crash. Computer programmes are also extensively used to model the front of vehicles and the dynamics of an accident. The tests used by EuroNCAP and in European legislation use impactors that are fired into the car front at specific speeds. Impactors are used, rather than a pedestrian dummy, to ensure the repeatability of the experiment. Real world studies which examined the frequency and severity of pedestrian injuries were used to determine which areas of the car front will be tested by the impactors - and so each impactor tests how much a car front will prevent a common real world injury. The deceleration of the impactors is measured to assess the energy absorption characteristics of the different parts of the vehicle. The severity of the injury is dependent on the force that the vehicle exerts on the impactor during the test - the greater the force, the more likely the injury caused by the car front would be serious or fatal.