Int. J. Vehicle Safety, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2008 319 Copyright © 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. A modified rigid barrier for improved assessment of occupant injury in incompatible frontal collisions Anindya Deb* and Kalyan S. Cheruvu Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India 560012 E-mail: adeb@cpdm.iisc.ernet.in E-mail: kalyan.cheruvu@gmail.com *Corresponding author Shi-jie Ruan Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin, China 300222 Abstract: Recent statistics on road traffic fatalities indicate that occupants of low ride-height cars are generally at a disadvantage in frontal collisions against incompatible vehicles such as SUVs and pickup trucks. To overcome the inadequacy of current vehicle crash safety tests, it has been recently shown that a stepped rigid barrier (SRB) can be a cost-effective tool for assessing the safety performance of a unibody car in collision against a body-on-frame pickup truck. However, the potential of the SRB was shown in terms of its ability to better represent the severe upper body deformation a car can experience during collision against a pickup truck. It has been demonstrated here that new car assessment programme injury parameters also compare well in car-to-truck and car against the previously developed SRB collisions. The assessment of the SRB is done with the help of the explicit finite element analysis solver of LS-DYNA 960. Keywords: incompatible collision; NCAP; new car assessment programme; simulation; SRB; stepped rigid barrier; vehicle. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Deb, A., Cheruvu, K.S. and Ruan, S-j. (2008) ‘A modified rigid barrier for improved assessment of occupant injury in incompatible frontal collisions’, Int. J. Vehicle Safety, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp.319–337. 1 Introduction According to recent reports from NHTSA (2003), there is an increasing trend of accidents between passenger cars and light trucks and vans (LTVs) in the USA. In collisions between cars and LTVs, approximately 80% of fatalities are suffered by the occupants of cars (Gabler and Hollowell, 2000). The number of registrations of LTVs has gone up significantly in the recent years and in fact almost reached a level of 50% of all light vehicles sold in 2001 (Vehicle compatibility, 2003). This increase in the