Most motor vehicle deaths and injuries occur in one of the front seats, so most vehicle testing and regulations involve the front seats. This has led to a great improvement in the safety of the front seats. While the rear seats have also improved considerably, this has not occurred at the same rate as the front seats. The rear seats may now be less safe than the front seats for certain passengers in certain crash modes. This is an area of concern because ridesharing as well as automation are likely to increase the percentage of adults sitting in the rear seats. In order to better protect rear seat passengers, it is necessary to understand how current vehicle rear seats perform, and identify areas for improvement. In This study rear seat of eight passenger vehicles were tested and then modeled in crash tests.

Overall, the best injury response was seen in vehicles that had pretensioners in the rear seats, as well as vehicles that had steep seat pan angles. Although the seat back angle varied from vehicle to vehicle, each ATD was seated according to the same procedure, which resulted in similar pelvis angles. In the real world, it is likely that these differences would cause passengers to sit with different postures, which will have an effect on injury probability, so this should be considered in future work. These results show a high probability of injury in the rear seat, and suggest that pretensioners could be added to reduce likelihood of injury in the rear seat.


Finite Element Reconstruction of Vehicle Rear Seats With Adult Anthropomorphic Test Dummies (Atd) to Investigate Injury Risk

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

IDETC2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.