Accident studies conducted during the last twenty-five years clearly show that car to car head-on collision is a major impact configuration to take into account in order to improve safety on the roads. With new self protection ratings all cars offer equivalent behaviour against a fixed obstacle. So, in the future, the main progress will have to be made in car to car compatibility.
Recent studies have shown the feasibility of designing compatible cars for both structure behaviour and occupant protection. However, some requirements on front unit design could make this aim more difficult to achieve. We suggest developping a more comprehensive approach in order to better take into account all the constraints.
In addition, to improve car to car compatibility, we propose: first, to create homogeneous front ends to avoid energy deficiency and then, to control the crush force level of vehicles by both enforcing a minimum resistance of the passenger compartment and putting under control the energy absorption of the front unit of the car.
A testing procedure against deformable barrier is also proposed and presented to verify the aggressiveness level of the front unit.