Improving the protection of restrained front seat occupants in frontal crashes

This paper restates the principles that underlie Transport Canada's policy on occupant restraints. Those principles require both improvements in the protection of the individual occupant and increases in benefits to society through the more general use of restraint systems. Progress in seat belt use in Canada is summarized. The effectiveness of current three-point seat belts in preventing fatalities in frontal collisions is briefly reviewed. The residual injury problem in frontal collisions of equivalent or lower severity to the standard 48 km/h frontal barrier test is defined with reference to recent accident data. Performance of current systems in actual collisions and in the frontal barrier test is compared. It is concluded that requiring all occupant restraint systems to meet the alternative set of performance criteria, recently proposed by Transport Canada for automatic seat belts, would significantly improve their performance. Requiring only the use of available technology, the primary effect of those criteria would be virtually to preclude injurious head and facial contacts with the vehicle interior in collisions of the regulated collision severity. Objective methods of defining seat belt fit are still required, in particular to reduce the incidence of belt-induced abdominal injury. (A) For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD 864606.