About the Threshold for Fatal or Potentially Fatal Injuries in Car-to-Car Side Collisions - A Comparison Between Real Accidents and PMHS-Tests

This analysis is part of a retrospective real accident study of 670 occupants in 428 cars. In most cases the real accidents were reconstructed from police reports by means of photographs, accident drawings and descriptions of the damaged cars. In fatal crashes the cars, and in most cases the sites of the accidents were examined. Among 272 occupants involved in car side collisions, we found 41 belt protected near side front passengers, whose cars were impacted by another car with main impact points at the front passengers' doors and B-pillars. The analysis of the correlation between technical parameters of the real accidents and injuries of the passengers showed a high significant discrimination between MAIS and some regional AIS 0-3 on one hand, and MAIS and some regional AIS 4-6 on the other hand already for each of the technical variables EES, delta v and maximum deformation. The comparison between these 41 real accident cases and 57 PMHS (postmortem human subjects) tests (15)* proved a significant difference between the thresholds for fatal injuries in respect to maximum deformation. The mean values of maximum deformation for fatal injuries in the real accidents were significantly higher than in the PMHS-tests. The possible causes of the differences are discussed.