Car accidents involving pedestrians or cyclists happen around the world every day. Frequently in traffic accidents, pedestrians or cyclists are hit by vehicles moving at a certain speed and their heads collide against car bonnets or the front windshield. For that reason authorities in the field of traffic safety around the world carry out research, do tests and obtain information aiming at increasing the safety of traffic participants, as well as present various life-saving effects advancing the development of pedestrian protection technological inventions. Such tests are simply based on measuring the forces acting upon things and, more importantly, people taking part in car accidents. For the purposes of learning more about head injuries sustained when colliding against a car, impactors simulating the head of an adult or a child pedestrian are projected from a testing machine towards the test vehicle. The force measure used for such a test obtains the impact force value which is subsequently assessed with the head injury criterion (HIC), i.e. the measure used to describe the likelihood of head injury sustained due to an impact, including those following car crashes.
Another test done with the view of improving the safety of pedestrians and cyclicts concerns breaking performance, which is described on the basis of the length of the distance after which a vehicle comes to a halt, as well as that vehicle’s stability while braking. In case of breaking performance tests, it is significant to remember that the temperature of the road surface affects the distance that a car travels before stopping – a factor which necessary to be determined for this kind of tests. Additionally, drivers participating in such tests are professionals who, due to their more than average driving abilities, influence the outcomes as they can stop more quickly than an average driver and shorten the stopping distance of the vehicle.
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