ESC was found to reduce crashes with personal injuries, especially serious and fatal injuries. The effectiveness ranged from at least 13% for car occupants in all types of crashes with serious or fatal outcome to a minimum of 35% effectiveness for single/oncoming/overtaking serious and fatal crashes on wet or icy road surface. No difference in deformation pattern was found for cars with or without ESC.

Differences in long-term outcome were dependent on both gender and age. Differences between age groups were generally greater than between genders. The vast majority of permanent medical impairments resulted from diagnoses with a low risk of fatality. The results emphasize the impact of age and gender in long-term consequences from car crashes. They could be used when designing safety technology in cars as well as to improve health care by contributing to better allocation of rehabilitation resources following trauma.

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The EvaRID dummy model demonstrated the potential of becoming a valuable tool when evaluating and developing seats and whiplash protection systems. However, updates of the joint stiffness will be required to provide better correlation at lower load levels. Moreover, the seated posture, curvature of the spine, and head position of 50th percentile female occupants needs to be established and implemented in future models.

Objective: There is limited knowledge of the long-term medical consequences for occupants injured in car crashes in various impact directions. Thus, the objective was to evaluate whether injuries leading to permanent medical impairment differ depending on impact direction.Methods: In total, 36,743 injured occupants in car crashes that occurred between 1995 and 2011 were included. All initial injuries (n = 61,440) were classified according to the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) 2005. Injured car occupants were followed for at least 3 years to assess permanent medical impairment. The data were divided into different groups according to impact direction and levels of permanent impairment. The risk of permanent medical impairment was established for different body regions and injury severity levels, according to AIS.Results: It was found that almost 12% of all car occupants sustained a permanent medical impairment. Given an injury, car occupants involved in rollover crashes had the highest overall risk to sustain a permanent medical impairment. Half of the head injuries leading to long-term consequences occurred in frontal impacts. Far-side occupants had almost the same risk as near-side occupants. Occupants who sustained a permanent medical impairment from cervical spine injuries had similar risk in all impact directions (13%) except from rollover (17%). However, these injuries occurred more often in rear crashes. Most of the injuries leading to long-term consequences were classified as minor injuries by AIS for all impact directions.Conclusions: Studying crash data from a perspective of medical impairment is important to identify injuries that might not be prioritized only considering the AIS but might lead to lower quality of life for the occupant and also costs for society. These results can be used for road transport system strategies and for making priority decisions in vehicle design.