At Milford, Every Day Is a Wreck: GM Marks 15,000th Crash Test

New Pontiac G6 Is Latest Vehicle To Take A Hit In The Name Of Passenger Safety

Milford, Mich. September 22, 2004; By ramming a barrier into the side of a new Pontiac G6 sedan, General Motors today will mark its 15,000th crash test since the company officially began recording them in the late 1950s.

The test is one of hundreds conducted every year at the GM Proving Ground in Milford, where safety engineers validate GM's advanced safety technologies that help protect drivers and passengers in a crash.

Seventy years ago, in 1934, GM introduced the world's first barrier crash test, long before the first federal safety regulations. GM's commitment to testing beyond government requirements continues today.

"Crash tests have given us a profound understanding of vehicle safety," said Robert C. Lange, GM executive director of structure and safety integration. "Full vehicle crash tests are among the tools we use to assess vehicle safety technology advancements that have helped reduce the motor vehicle fatality rate by about 30 percent over the last two decades."

Today's test on the Pontiac G6 will be a severe side impact, such as an intersection-type crash. The test involves placing a dummy, representative of a 172-pound man, into the driver's seat and another in the rear passenger seat of a vehicle, then slamming a barrier into the driver's side at 38.5 miles an hour. The barrier deforms in the crash, mimicking what would happen to the front of the striking vehicle. Scientific instruments in the dummies measure the probability of specific injuries a human would receive.

Side impact crashes account for about 30 percent of collisions and 25 percent of injuries.

As part of a voluntary industry commitment, GM has already started to provide enhanced side impact protection for passenger car and light truck occupants. The commitment calls for all vehicles to have this enhanced protection by 2009. This will include enhanced side structures and additional technologies that help protect the head in side-impact crashes such as side air bags and air bag curtains.

"This test is an example of how far we've come in vehicle crash testing," Lange said. "We started with one crash condition - the frontal crash - and one dummy simulating an average-sized male. Today we test for 29 different crash conditions using an entire family of dummies.

"And for every physical test, GM conducts a hundred times as many virtual crash events, using high-powered computers to simulate combinations of occupant sizes; crash conditions; restraint systems; and vehicle materials and types. The combination of crash tests, virtual simulations and crash analyses provides us with the data that helps us develop safer vehicles," Lange said.

More than 30 years ago, GM led in the development and sharing of today's sophisticated crash test dummies, which monitor the forces on the human body during a crash. Costing more than $100,000 each, these dummies - formally known as anthropomorphic test devices (or ATDs) - are wired with sensors that transmit dozens of continuous measurements to a computer that records a stream of data 4,000 times during the two-fifths of a second duration of a crash.

Lange said that in the future, engineers likely will be able to use computer modeling to create an even wider variety of crash test subjects that take characteristics such as age and physical condition into account. This will be increasingly important as the large number of Baby Boomers advance in age.