RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DRIVER CRASH INJURY AND PASSENGER CAR WEIGHT

Using data from North Carolina highway accidents, the relationship between driver injury and passenger car weight is investigated for a variety of known car makes and model years. For this analysis, injuries sustained by unbelted drivers are compared across car weights for single vehicle ran-off-road crashes and for car-to-car crashes. In car-to-car crashes, there is a definite negative relationship between car weight and a derived serious injury index which represents the ratio of the observed frequency of serious injuries in a given make and model year to the expected number of serious injuries based on the proportion of serious injuries sustained by the totality of drivers in the study. In contrast, for the single vehicle ran-off-road crashes in this study, there is no association between car weight and serious driver injury. In addition, in car-to-car crashes, serious injuries are considerably more prevalent in crashes involving cars in the lightest weight classes and generally decline with increasing car weight. In front-to-side crashes, controlling for respective car weights, the driver of the side-struck car generally sustains serious injuries more frequently than his front-striking counterpart. And, similarly, in front-to-rear crashes, the driver of the front-striking car generally fares worse. /AUTHOR/

• Record URL:
  http://www.hsrc.unc.edu/research_library/PDFs/Relationship73.ocr.pdf
• 
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Sponsored by Office of the Governor's Highway Safety Coordinator, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Washington, D. C.
• Corporate Authors:

  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

  Highway Safety Research Center
  Chapel Hill, NC  United States  27599
• Authors:
  • Campbell, B J
  • Reinfurt, D W
• Publication Date: 1973-11

Media Info

• Features: Appendices; Figures; Tables;
• Pagination: 59 p.

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Automobiles; Crashes; Drivers; Indexes (Information management); Injuries; Manual safety belts; Single vehicle crashes; Traffic crashes; Vehicles; Weight
• Subject Areas: Highways; Safety and Human Factors; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00262120
• Record Type: Publication
• Source Agency: National Safety Council Safety Research Info Serv
• Report/Paper Numbers: UNC/HSRC-73/11/1
• Contract Numbers: 310-73-001-001
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Nov 12 1974 12:00AM