Abstract
Lead vehicle stopped crashes are a top contributor to traffic and health care expenditures out of NHTSA’s 37 pre-crash scenarios. It is important to better understand how these crashes occur, so that evolving autonomous vehicle technologies may be tailored towards injury mitigation in crash-imminent scenarios. Additionally, as autonomous vehicle technologies increase in prevalence and usage, out of position seating and distracted driving behavior may also increase. In order to analyze injury patterns in real-world lead vehicle stopped crashes, the public portal of Crash Injury Research Engineering Network (CIREN) was surveyed for lead vehicle stopped impacts. The review found that, of all the body regions, the thorax and lower extremity body regions frequently sustained AIS 3+ injuries (P < 0.01). Additionally, the upper extremity frequently sustained AID 3+ injuries in some scenarios. Steering wheel contact (often times through a deployed air bag) was the source of 62% of the thorax injuries and the knee bolster was the source of 76% of the lower extremity injuries. Truck impacts, and complicated crashes accounted for over 50% of the cases in the cohort. Automated vehicle behaviors have the potential to augment passive and active safety systems to potentially decrease the occurrence of AIS 3+ injuries by improving a vehicle’s response to lead vehicle stopped, crash imminent scenarios.
