Updating Generic Crush Stiffness Coefficients for Accident Reconstruction 2010-01-1581

Often, the accident reconstructionist will find that there is no crash test data for a particular vehicle, making a direct calculation of the crush stiffness coefficients impossible without performing an actual crash test. A faster and more cost effective solution is to use “generic” crush stiffness coefficients that relate similar already tested vehicles to the incident vehicle. One previously published article that has been used for this purpose is; “Updating the Vehicle Class Categories” by Siddall and Day [ 9 ]. However, this paper, along with Hargens and Day's earlier paper, “Vehicle Data Sources for Accident Reconstruction” [ 3 ], are now somewhat outdated by newer model vehicles.

New generic crush stiffness coefficient values were calculated to better represent newer vehicles produced between 1990-1999 and 2000-2009. The same eleven vehicle classifications used in this article were obtained from the above cited paper.

The crush stiffness coefficients were calculated for each category for the entire population of the data used. The data was broken into different decades in which the vehicles were produced. After the analysis was performed, it was noted that crush stiffness values showed an upward trend for newer vehicles.