Accidents Between Pedestrian and Industrial Vehicles: From Injury Patterns to Dummy and Truck Prototypes

This paper provides new results on the safety of pedestrians involved in accidents with industrial vehicles such as trucks and buses. The analysis of two accident databases highlighted the importance of the frontal impacts, run over scenario and the thorax loading for this accident type (when using car pedestrian accidents as a reference). The accidents were then studied using full scale tests conducted with three standard industrial vehicles, one prototype and two pedestrian dummies (including a new modified dummy). The test results include an analysis of the kinematics and of dummy signals. Beyond specific test results, the study describes the development of a possible methodology to improve the safety of vulnerable road users involved in accidents with industrial vehicles and discusses a possible strategy.