Rear impacts bet­ween cars and pede­strians

All efforts made until now regarding pedestrian friendly car design focused on the vehicle front. All passive and active measures are designed to handle the impact of a pedestrian with the vehicle front which may include the wing area also. Accident research proves the vehicle front as the area to address first. But this study shows that there are accident patterns which need attention, too.

For this study, the in-depth database of the German Insurers (UDB) was used. The analyzed datapool contains 390 pedestrian-car accidents. Data shows the need to address the front impact pedestrians (59 percent) as it is done nowadays. But there are other noticeable problems like the rear impact, for example. 17 percent of the car-pedestrian accidents were rear impacts where the car was reversing slowly. Almost half of the involved pedestrians suffered severe injuries that were all caused by the impact with the ground. It was also interesting that one third of the pedestrians that were hit by the rear end of the car were not moving as the impact occurred. Other project results were: Most of the cases involved were typical parking manoeuvres and happened at daylight. The majority of involved pedestrians were female.

From the point of view of UDV only technical solutions will help. Former UDV research showed that an emergency brake assist which detects pedestrians behind the car and brakes before the collision occurs could mitigate or even avoid 13 percent of all analysed pedestrian/car-accidents.