Otte 1 ROLLOVER ACCIDENTS OF CARS IN THE GERMAN ROAD TRAFFIC – AN IN-DEPTH- ANALYSIS OF INJURY AND DEFORMATION PATTERN BY GIDAS

1 cooperative study of FAT and BASt ABSTRACT This paper describes the injury pattern of car occupants in rollover crashes by type, location and severity AIS. The accident cases were collected randomly within GIDAS (German In-DepthAccident Study) at Hannover. Since 1999 in Germany a joint project between BASt (Bundesanstalt für Straßenwesen or the Federal Highway Research Institute) and FAT (Forschungsvereinigung Automobiltechnik or Automotive Industry Research Association) is being carried out in Hannover and Dresden. The paper describes the methodology of this project with statistically orientated procedure of data sampling (sampling plan, weighting factors) on one hand and describes the results of the injury pattern of car occupants after rollover and gives indication for understanding where rollovers are happened and what kind of influences are exist on the other hand. The rollover movement characteristics will be described and the resultant deformation pattern analysed by a detailed survey. For the study 434 cases of car accidents with rollovers are used for a detail comprehensive analysis. The portion of rollovers can be established at 2.3% of all accidents with casualties in the year 2003.The accidents happened in the years 1994 to 2000 in the Hannover area. The injury distribution will report about 741 occupants with rollover accident event. These accidents are compared with the others without rollover documented in the same sample of GIDAS under a representative random spot check methodology. The distributions of injury frequencies, injury severity AIS for the whole body and for the body regions of occupants are presented and compared to technical details like the impact speed and the deformation pattern. The speed of the car was determined at the point of rollover and on the point of accident initiency. The characteristics of the kinematics followed in a rollover movement are analyzed and the major defined types of rollover are shown in the paper. The possibilities of In-Depth-Investigation methods for the approach of finding countermeasures against rollover and explaining the biomechanics of injuries in rollover are shown in the paper as well.