Injury comparisons between paired drivers and front‐seat passengers in frontal collisions using publicly available crash and injury data

Abstract

AbstractForensic engineers and crash safety researchers sometimes use the injuries of a seatbelted occupant to infer the injury risk of an unbelted occupant in the same crash, had they instead been wearing a seatbelt. It is unclear, however, whether this inference is valid or how often two occupants in the same collision have similar injuries. Here, we sought to compare the injury outcomes between drivers and front‐seat passengers in frontal collisions using real‐world collision data. We compared the injury severity, quantified using the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS), of 22 injury categories between front‐seat occupants with matching seatbelt use and airbag deployment in single‐event frontal collisions recorded in the publicly available National Automotive Sampling System, Crashworthiness Data System (years 1993–2015) database to assess whether they had similar severity injuries. We analyzed the four combinations of seatbelt use and airbag deployment and all seatbelt/airbag conditions combined. In only 3 of 88 combinations of injuries and seatbelt/airbag conditions did more than 50% of occupant pairs have the same AIS score, although the related confidence intervals showed these proportions were not significantly greater than 50%. In contrast, we found 19 combinations of injuries and seatbelt/airbag conditions where one occupant was consistently injured more severely than the other. Our findings show that injury outcome is not similar for both front‐seat occupants in the same frontal collision with similar seatbelt and airbag conditions; however, one may be able to predict that one occupant would be more severely injured than their fellow occupant.