Recently, global railway car makers are competing desperately in developing high-speed railway vehicles. Ensuring passenger safety during a crash is essential. The design and the manufacturing of energy absorbing components are becoming more and more important. A deformation tube is a typical passive energy absorbing component for railway cars.In the current study the slab method was used to predict the energy absorbing capability of a deformation tube during the early design stage. The usefulness of the prediction method is verified through the comparisons between the results of FE simulations and those of the prediction method.