Analysis Of Vehicle Impact Safety Under The Context Of Gender Disparity

The objective of vehicle impact test is to rate the safety level of vehicles by simulating several special crash cases based on analysis of the injury severity of vehicles and occupants.The government takes this test as one of the main ways of macro-management of quality for the vehicle market.Many researchers focused on identifying validity of vehicle impact safety test based on analysis of real-world traffic crashes data without considering the gender disparity.Therefore,the objective of this thesis is to validate 5-star safety rating system from NHTSA in new measures and rating results under the context of gender disparity by modeling drivers’ injury severity based on real-world traffic data from Florida and Maryland in the United States of America.The results of this thesis illustrate that the addition of test-dummies by gender in the 5-star safety rating system can effectively improve vehicle safety performance for female and male drivers;The results of 5-star safety rating can effectively reflect the safety performance of vehicles for male drivers in actual crashes to a certain extent,but this rating cannot provide a reasonable reference of vehicles’ safety performance for female drivers;More than 90% of the vehicles are rated as 4-stars or above,which indicates that the existing 5-star safety rating is no longer effectively distinguish the safety performance of vehicles;In vehicles that have the same safety rating,the probability of serious injury of female drivers is higher than that of male drivers,and the vehicles do not equally protect both of female and male drivers.Finally,this thesis proposes to design more representative and more realistic female dummies,periodically calibrate simulation crash cases based on analysis of traffic crashes,increase the complexity and diversity of impact-testing programs about vehicle safety performance to fill the gap in considering gender disparity of 5-star safety rating system.Moreover,based on the analysis of factors affecting drivers’ injury severity,this thesis puts forward some suggestions for improving the traffic safety environment from the aspects of enhancing drivers’ safety consciousness,drivers’ driving behavior and individualized safety monitoring.