Project Investigation of the Correlation between Roadside Safety Hardware and Vehicle Safety Standards Evaluation Criteria
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abstract
The Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) defines crash tests to assess the impact performance of highway safety features in frontal and oblique impact events using criteria that are based on the structural adequacy of the safety feature, post-impact behavior of the test vehicle, and risks of injury for the occupants of the impacting vehicle. MASH occupant risk criteria, however, are considered conservative in their nature, due to the fact that they are based on unrestraint occupant accelerations. Due to increased enforcement, significantly more occupants are belted in real world crashes. In addition, large improvements to occupant protection, whose contribution is not being considered within MASH occupant risk criteria, can significantly reduce the risk of injury to an occupant in a collision. Therefore, there is potential for increasing the maximum limits dictated in MASH for occupant risk evaluation.
