COLLISION SAFETY OF A HARD-SHELL LOW-MASS VEHICLE

Low-mass vehicles and in particular low-mass electric vehicles as prod uced today in very small quantities are in general not designed for cr ashworthiness in collisions. Particular problems of compact low-mass c ars are: reduced length of the car front, low mass compared to other v ehicles, and heavy batteries in the case of an electric car. With the intention of studying design improvements, three frontal crash tests w ere run last year: the first one with a commercial, lightweight electr ic car; the second with a reinforced version of the same car; and the last one with a car based on a different structural design with a ''ha rd-shell'' car body. Crash tests showed that the latter solution made better use of the small zone available for continuous energy absorptio n. The paper discusses further the problem of frontal collisions betwe en vehicles of different weight and, in particular, the side collision . A side-collision test was run with the hard-shell vehicle following the ECE lateral-impact test procedure at 50 km/h and led to results fo r the EuroSID1-dummy well below current injury tolerance criteria.