Abstract
Passive Safety dominated the safety discussion for decades and has been very successful in reducing fatalities and injury risk. However, the level of passive safety is different in different parts of the world. While European countries reduce fatalities even in absolute numbers, some other countries have stagnating fatalities. The emerging markets even have a significant increase in fatalities, following the increase in motorization. This poses challenges for a world-wide accident research: To understand and to take into account the need of these different markets, to keep the trend stable in Europe and to change the trend in the emerging countries.
Keeping the trend stable in Europe means continuing decrease in fatalities. In a first step, this paper gives an idea about the safety measures that made this trend possible. Once the implementation of these safety measures in the whole fleet is finished, stagnation will occur. Thus, new measures are needed to ensure that fatalities will decrease in the future. As is shown in this paper, these measures will be primarily measures relating to active safety and driver assistance.
The contribution that passive safety can make in the future is discussed as well. Possible measures relating to passive safety that might be of benefit to keep the positive downward fatality number trend are identified. It is shown that measures of passive and active safety have to be integrated into a general safety concept. This should be optimized with regard to the world region under consideration. Analyses presented in this paper show that passive safety optimizations in the current fleet with stronger passenger compartments able to score high in the 64 km/h ODB test has lead to entirely positive results. Overall passenger safety was improved dramatically.
For the future, safety researchers are encouraged to look into the safety performance of cars no longer from the view point of a passive safety alone, which was very successful in the nineties, but to look into the overall safety of vehicles to reflect the full benefit of the customers.
Keywords: Accident Research, Passive Safety, Active Safety, Region, Asia, China, Priorities