Study of the relationship between injury outcomes in police reported crash data and crash barrier test results in Europe and Australia

This paper reports on the use of police reported crash data from Great Britain, and Germany to
estimate injury risk and injury severity measures for European vehicles. The relationship between
these measures and EuroNCAP test results is evaluated for vehicles tested under the EuroNCAP test program. Additional analysis focuses on front impact and side impact police reported crashes and evaluates the relationship between EuroNCAP test results and injury outcome in police reported crashes for each of these crash types in Great Britain. Results using the combined German and UK real world crash data point to improving average vehicle crashworthiness with increasing EuroNCAP star rating. Analysis of the component measures of the crashworthiness metric shows this result stems from an association between average injury severity and overall EuroNCAP star rating and not the injury risk component of the crashworthiness measure.
Comparison of average crashworthiness ratings based on frontal impact crashes within EuroNCAP
offset frontal impact star rating categories showed no trends whilst a strong association between average crashworthiness in side impact crashes and the side impact EuroNCAP score was observed.