Accident studies show that incompatibility has become the main
cause of fatal injury in car-to-car accidents. There is a general
agreement today that improving compatibility is one of the most
effective ways to reduce the number of road accident victims.
Therefore, structural car design must take into account other
road users without decreasing self-protection level supplied by all
new passenger cars. In addition to these safety considerations, the
front unit structural design has to account for an increasing
number of constraints: improvement of real-world performance in
safety, fulfill current and future regulations like
"CAFÉ" or pedestrian, reducing utilization costs and so
on.
Furthermore, European fleet is changing in mass and in size, as
the world's ones, and new fashion vehicles appear different
than the previous one.
This paper deals with the development of a more comprehensive
approach in order to better take into account safety requirements
coming from real-life accidents and the work done over the past
years on understanding the physic of compatibility. The aim of this
paper is to propose a better assessment procedure and a new test
methodology in a standard approach for improving compatibility.