Vehicle Mass and Driver Injury

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Abstract
This paper analyses the effect of vehicle mass on the severity of injury sustained by drivers in head-on accidents in rural areas of Great Britain In two-vehicle collisions, a consequence of Newton's laws is that relative velocity change is in inverse proportion to vehicle mass. Increased velocity change causes increased severity of injury. Our data show, for instance, that when the larger vehicle is twice the mass of the other, the percentage of deaths in the lighter vehicle is about six times that in the heavier The effect of mass alone on driver injury has also been investigated—by considering only those two-vehicle collisions in which the vehicles were of nearly equal mass—and found to be negligible.