BACKGROUND

The AASHTO Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) requires full-scale crash testing of roadside hardware (RSH) using worst practical impact conditions, which should be representative of the composition of vehicles involved in run-off-road crashes and of the roadside departure speeds and angles. Previous NCHRP projects have led to changes in standard test conditions and test vehicles. MASH was introduced in the mid-2000s and updated the standards and evaluation criteria for choosing which passenger cars and pickup trucks to crash test. A midsize test vehicle was also introduced. After exploratory crash testing for each of these changes in test vehicle selection criteria, a narrow range of makes and models were informally adopted as the preferred test vehicles, offering reproducible and economical outcomes.

NCHRP Project 20-07(372), "Evaluation of MASH Test Vehicles," indicated a significant decline in new passenger car sales and a rise in new light truck sales since 2014, driven primarily by compact utility vehicle (CUV) sales. Hence, updates for the selection criteria used for standardized passenger car and light truck test vehicles were recommended, as was exploratory full-scale testing to evaluate RSH using the CUV class of test vehicle. Pilot testing evaluating existing MASH-compliant RSH using the new proposed vehicles, with emphasis on the CUV class, is needed to ensure that testing criteria remains representative of practical, worst-case impact conditions.

OBJECTIVES 

The objectives of this research are to

• Determine which test vehicles and corresponding characteristics are representative of the changing vehicle fleet, 
• Conduct full-scale crash tests of previously tested MASH-compliant RSH using representative vehicles, 
• Identify RSH performance differences between existing MASH-compliant test vehicles and new representative vehicles, and 
• Recommend vehicle types and corresponding characteristics for RSH crash safety analysis.

STATUS: Research in Progress.