Influence of the Missing Vehicle and Cdc Only Delta-v Reconstruction Algorithms for Prediction of Occupant Injury Risk

Delta-V, the change in velocity of a vehicle, is a widely used predictor of occupant injury in vehicle collisions. In real world crashes, delta-V is commonly estimated from measurements of vehicle deformation using absorbed energy based methods. The accuracy of these estimates is highly dependent on the availability of deformation measurements for both vehicles involved in a crash. Specialized algorithms have been developed for those cases in which complete information is not available from a crash (e.g. the missing vehicle algorithm) or has been estimated (e.g. the collision deformation classification, or CDC only algorithm). The objectives of this study are to evaluate (1) the accuracy of the missing vehicle and CDC only algorithms and (2) the influence of these algorithms upon estimates of occupant injury risk. The approach is to develop and critically evaluate occupant injury risk curves using the standard, missing, and CDC only reconstruction algorithms for 1899 real vehicles extracted from the National Automotive Sampling System / Crash Data System for 2006.