A Comprehensive Review of System Risk in Automotive Crash Safety

Occupant protection has been at the forefront of risk evaluation regarding vehicle crashworthiness design. However, the vehicle is a member of a larger transportation system with varied stakeholders. This paper identifies an opportunity for assessing risk in a crash event through emerging safety science paradigms. Conventional Safety I and Safety II frameworks handle well-defined hazards but falter with uncertainty, variability, and emergent behaviors in real crashes. A comprehensive literature review was performed spanning standards, regulatory guidance, safety science, and peer-reviewed research to situate automotive crash safety risk within the Safety III paradigms. The review addresses two questions: (1) How is “risk” defined across the crash safety literature and adjacent safety science domains? and (2) What limitations arise from these definitions in practice? Findings show a dominant probabilistic framing alongside a minority of systems-oriented interpretations, with substantial inconsistency across organizations and development phases. Recurrent gaps include limited coverage of real-world variability, weak linkage to field data, lack of standardization, and inadequate treatment of epistemic uncertainty. Based on this synthesis, the paper proposes guiding principles for a Safety III-aligned definition that integrates consequence, uncertainty, and knowledge strength to improve transparency, traceability, and adaptability in crash safety decision-making.