TY - JOUR PY - 1999// TI - Large and Small Cars in Real-World Crashes: Patterns of Use, Collision Types, and Injury Outcomes JO - Annual proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine A1 - Frampton, Richard J. A1 - Thomas, P. SP - 101 EP - 118 VL - 43 IS - N2 - Previous work examining the effect of vehicle mass has proven the link with occupant injury severity. The principal factor has been related to Newtonian mechanics. This paper analyzes data from the United Kingdom Cooperative 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 roadside 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 this paper argues that vehicle design should take account of this variation to produce vehicles optimized for the complete range of crashes and car occupants.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 1540-0360 UR - http://dx.doi.org/ ID - ref1 ER -