Structural Safety & Crashworthiness
Structural integrity is the foundation of the AutoSafe™ system. This section evaluates the vehicle’s ability to preserve survival space, control cabin deformation, and minimize injury metrics across multiple crash configurations—including frontal, side, rear and rollover impacts.
All assessments use high-speed sensors, ATDs (anthropomorphic test devices), cabin deformation mapping, and intrusion measurements to ensure real-world crash robustness.
These evaluations form the structural backbone of the AutoSafe™ rating, ensuring that every vehicle is judged not only on how it withstands a collision, but also on how it manages energy, protects different occupant sizes, and maintains a stable survival space under realistic crash pulses. Together, these criteria provide a transparent and engineering-driven foundation for understanding true crashworthiness performance.
Structural Safety & Crashworthiness forms the core of AutoSafe™ evaluation, ensuring that occupant survival space is maintained, cabin deformation is minimized, and critical injury metrics remain within safe thresholds across all major crash scenarios.
Frontal Impact
Frontal impact testing evaluates how effectively the vehicle preserves the occupant survival space during offset and full-width collisions. It also examines how the restraint systems— including airbags and belt pretensioners—manage crash forces and respond at precise timing intervals to protect different occupant sizes.
Detailed analyses cover A-pillar behaviour, steering column movement and footwell deformation. This is considered one of the most critical domains within structural safety evaluation.
- 64 km/h offset deformable barrier test
- 50 km/h full-width rigid barrier impact
- A-pillar integrity & steering column displacement
- Footwell deformation and pedal intrusion mapping
- Airbag + belt pretensioner deployment timing
Side Impact
Side impact testing focuses on thoracic, abdominal and pelvic protection in lateral collisions. The combination of mobile deformable barrier and side-pole impacts allows AutoSafe™ to evaluate how well the vehicle structure and curtain airbags protect occupants when struck from the side.
These crash modes involve high injury potential due to minimal crumple zone, making this a high-severity risk area.
- 60 km/h MDB side impact test
- 32 km/h narrow-object side pole test
- B-pillar & door intrusion mapping
- Curtain airbag coverage & timing
- Rib, abdomen & pelvis injury metrics
Rear Impact & Whiplash
Rear impact evaluations assess neck injury risks using dynamic sled simulations that replicate real-world rear-end collision pulses. Head restraint geometry, seatback strength and rebound behaviour are all analysed to ensure proper occupant kinematics are maintained.
This domain holds particular importance for family cars and daily-use vehicles where low-speed rear collisions are common, making it an essential consumer-safety category.
- Neck Injury Criterion (NIC) evaluation
- Head-to-headrest geometry verification
- Seatback strength & deformation limits
- Rebound kinematics during sled tests
Rollover Protection
Rollover protection evaluates cabin integrity during overturn or multi-roll events. The focus is on roof strength, pillar deformation and the vehicle’s ability to maintain survivable space for all occupants.
Testing also verifies the duration and stability of curtain airbag deployment to help prevent occupant ejection and head injury.
- Roof crush strength under sustained loads
- Survival space preservation in rollover
- A/B-pillar deformation analysis
- Curtain airbag deployment duration
EV Structural Safety
EV structural evaluation focuses on the crash protection of high-voltage battery systems. Battery enclosure integrity, intrusion limits and mounting-point robustness are examined across frontal, side and underride crash modes.
Additional criteria verify post-crash HV isolation and the activation of safety mechanisms such as pyrofuses—making this an EV-specific critical area.
- Battery cage intrusion protection
- Structural thresholds around HV modules
- Post-crash isolation & voltage decay checks
- Pyrofuse activation verification
Scoring Summary
Structural performance is the most heavily weighted part of the AutoSafe™ system, representing 30% of the total score. This reflects the principle that even the most advanced active-safety technologies cannot compensate once a crash is unavoidable and the structure itself becomes the final line of defence.
- Cabin intrusion mapping across all major crash modes
- Biomechanical injury thresholds (HIC, chest, pelvis, neck)
- Restraint-system timing and algorithm performance
- Battery post-crash safety scoring for EVs where applicable
Characteristics of High Performance
Vehicles achieving top structural safety scores typically exhibit:
- Very low cabin intrusion in frontal, side and rollover tests
- Stable, predictable deformation paths with strong passenger cell integrity
- Consistently low injury metrics for occupants in multiple seating positions
- Effective coordination of airbags, pretensioners and load limiters
- For EVs, robust protection of the battery pack with no loss of HV isolation
Next in the AutoSafe™ Standard
Occupant Protection (Adult & Child)
Explore how AutoSafe™ evaluates adult and child safety using advanced ATDs and high-resolution injury metrics.