Getting physical

摘要

Thatcham has been crash testing cars since 1969 for the UK's insurance industry. Until recently the work focused mainly on the repairability of vehicles, but over the past decade the UK laboratory has steadily become more closely involved with Euro NCAP. Responding to the huge increase in whiplash claims, researchers there started looking at the relationship between car seat designs and injury claims. With tests designed that could assess a seat's performance, the lab decided to get involved with Euro NCAP to see if its work could feed into the safety organisation's influential new car assessments. While the swift changes to seat design that resulted have done little to cure the huge number of bogus whiplash claims in the UK, it was clear that testing could not only help better predict injuries and losses, it could also be used to change things for the better. "Thatcham aims to support insurers suffering from the exponential rise in whiplash claims," says chief executive Peter Shaw. "We saw we could impact this significantly through vehicle-based technology and we realised that autonomous emergency braking would have the greatest impact."