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Adrian PatonHonda: POLAR III Revolutionary Pedestrian Dummy
October 27th 2008 05:15
In Australia, one in six people killed in fatal road crashes between 2001 and 2005 was a pedestrian and to this day, an average of 91 pedestrians are killed in road crashes each year. Honda, one of the leaders in automotive safety, became the first manufacturer in the world to develop a pedestrian crash test dummy that reproduced the human body’s kinematics during vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions.
Over the past 10 years, the Japanese car maker has continued to fine-tune this technology and recently, they announced that crash tests will begin using its new third generation pedestrian dummy, POLAR III, before the end of this year.
The objective of the program is to reduce pedestrian injuries which are common in collisions between a pedestrian and a four wheel drive vehicle or mini-van such as lower back and upper leg injuries.
Honda Australia’s Managing Director, Mr. Yasuhide Mizuno, said cars imported into Australia should benefit from this improved technology as early as next year.
“Honda is committed to producing the best cars and ensuring they are as safe as possible. Honda models sold in Australia will soon be tested using this latest crash test technology making our cars safer than ever,” Mr. Mizuno said.
This is the latest example of Honda using its pedestrian dummies to proactively conduct research in the area of pedestrian injury mitigation, as it has for the past decade. The project identified the parts of the vehicle that caused the most injuries and developed revolutionary safety technologies to reduce pedestrian head injuries during a collision.
In 1998, Honda announced the development of a vehicle body designed to reduce pedestrian head injuries and applied it to the Honda HR-V.
Two years later, Honda continued its advancements by developing the second generation pedestrian dummy, POLAR II, which further improved understanding of the human body’s kinematics in an accident.
With the introduction of POLAR III, the faithful reproduction of lower back and upper legs has been further improved, enabling the evaluation of bone fractures in these areas in addition to the existing ability to evaluate injuries to knee ligaments and fractures to lower leg bones.
[Source: Honda]
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