The share of high-tensile steel in car bodies has increased over the last years. While occupant safety has generally benefited from this measure, there is a potential risk that, as a result, rescue time may increase considerably. In more than 60% of all car occupant fatalities a technical rescue has been necessary. These are in particular those cases where occupants die immediately at the accident scene. Therefore, in these cases "rescue time" is a very sensitive parameter. In addition to the general analysis of the need of technical rescue and the actual rescue time depending on model years, the injury pattern of occupants requiring technical rescue will be analysed to provide advice for rescue teams. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of rescue measures for the most popular car models depending on the safety cell design is given.
Today, Euro NCAP is a well established rating system for passive car safety. The significance of the ratings must however be evaluated by comparison with national accident data. For this purpose accidents with involvement of two passenger cars have been taken from the German National Road Accident Register (record years 1998 to 2004) to evaluate the results of the NCAP frontal impact test configuration. Injury data from both drivers involved in frontal car to car collisions have been sampled and have been compared, using a "Bradley Terry Model" which is well established in the area of paired comparisons. Confounders " like mass ratio of the cars involved, gender of the driver, etc. " have been accounted for in the statistical model. Applying the Bradley Terry Model to the national accident data the safety ranking from Euro NCAP has been validated (safety level: 1star <2 star <3 star <4 star). Significant safety differences are found between cars of the 1 and 2 star category as compared to cars of the 3 and 4 star category. The impact of the mass ratio was highly significant and most influential. Changing the mass ratio by an amount of 10% will raise the chance for the driver of the heavier car to get better off by about 18%. The impact of driver gender was again highly significant, showing a nearly 2 times lower injury risk for male drivers. With regard to the NCAP rating drivers of a high rated car are more than 2 times more probable (70% chance) to get off less injured in a frontal collision as compared to the driver of a low rated car.