Thoracic side airbags and structural performance in vehicle–vehicle lateral impacts

ABSTRACT

Over the last few decadesthe longitudinal and lateral stiffness of the vehicle fleet has increased and a greater presence of passive safety measures have been integrated. The analysis reviews a series of real world vehicle-vehicle lateral collisions from NASS-CDS to identify any shifts in crashworthiness. The study attempts to isolate an effectiveness estimation for the deployed thoracic side airbag (tSAB) in preventing thoracic injury and secondly identify if newer struck vehicles are more resistant to intrusion than older vehicles. To assess the proposed hypotheses, similar severity collisions are paired to one another and traditional statistic tests can be applied. The results indicated that, the rate of rate of injury between the occupants in vehicles with the deployed tSAB did not differ to those unexposed to the tSAB. Results attaining to the second hypothesis demonstrated that newer vehicles are more resistant to lateral intrusion than older vehicles, mostly evident with an impact velocity of 40–60 km/h.

KEYWORDS:

• Serious thoracic injury
• thoracic side airbag
• raw injury rate
• door intrusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.