Assessment of Child Occupant Protection in ASEAN NCAP

Abstract

Statistics show that child traffic injuries are a public health problem globally, including Southeast Asia (SEA) region. With an overall value of road traffic death rate among children of 7.4 per 100,000 populations has put SEA as the second region to have the highest death rate after Africa. Due to this alarming figure, many safety interventions and inventions have been introduced and implemented to mitigate child injuries resulted from road traffic accidents. One of them is the establishment of crashworthiness rating programme for new passenger cars to evaluate the resulted child injuries via destructive tests. The New Car Assessment Programme for Southeast Asia region (ASEAN NCAP) established to elevate vehicle safety standards, raise consumer awareness and encourage market for saver vehicles in the dedicated region. Currently the programme assessed and rated passenger cars based on performance of adult and child occupant protection in frontal offset crash tests. Since its introduction, ASEAN NCAP has crash tested 28 popular passenger cars throughout its development phases. During these phases, there has been improvement on the rating of child occupant protection (COP) with the increase of number of cars getting 4-star. This paper presents the results of ASEAN NCAP tests for the development phases in term of COP rating as well as provides explanation on the related assessment.

Child Occupant Safety: Towards Implementation of Child Restraint System Law in Malaysia

“…The UN R44 regulation has long been introduced and used as a standard for the approval of the CRS. It has been used for over 30 years worldwide and was adopted by Road Transport Department Malaysia since 2013 (Solah et al, 2014;Abdul Wahab et al, 2017). While UN R129 was included by UN WP 29 in November 2012 and enforced on 9 July 2013.…”

ASEAN NCAP's Contribution to Malaysia's Automotive Ecosystem

“…12) and vehicle based assessment (max. 13) (total 49 points) (Solah et al, 2014b). In the dynamic assessment, the scoring will be based on head injury (Head Injury Criterion -HIC), neck injury (tension applied) and chest injury (chest acceleration).…”

“…In the dynamic assessment, the scoring will be based on head injury (Head Injury Criterion -HIC), neck injury (tension applied) and chest injury (chest acceleration). Similar to AOP, the COP rating is based on 6 scales from zero to five stars (rating introduced in September 2013; prior to this the COP was just referred by the percentage) (Solah et al, 2014b).…”

“…The majority of Malaysia's cars tested by ASEAN NCAP achieved four and five stars in AOP, in which the result is mainly associated or referred to as the overall 'safety level of a car' aside from the COP result. Furthermore, cars in the market are now equipped with child safety features, namely ISOFIX and top tether for CRS usage (Solah et al, 2014b). Results of Child Occupant Protection (COP) proved that these features do increase a child's safety i.e.…”