Investigation of injury potential through matched pair drop testing

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has concluded that there is a relationship between roof intrusion and the risk of injury to belted occupants in rollovers events. Previous testing on many different production vehicle types indicates that damage consistent with field rollover accidents can be achieved through inverted drop testing from small drop heights. It has been shown in previous drop test pairs with Hybrid III dummies, that the amount of roof intrusion is related to occupant neck injury. This paper analyzes inverted drop testing performed on Ford F250 Crew Cab production and reinforced pickups. Each of these pickup tests used Hybrid III test dummies in order to evaluate the occupant injury potential in relation to roof intrusion. The reinforced truck's residual crush was an order of magnitude less than the production truck crush. These tests indicated that the reduction of roof crush resulted in a direct reduction in neck loading and therefore an increase in occupant protection. In addition, it was found that the restraint loading was inversely related to the neck loading of the dummies.