GM FYI Blog

By Paul Simpson, Engineering Group Manager
Vehicle Safety & Crashworthiness Lab

What do you do when you want to reduce the likelihood that drivers of your vehicles will experience a life-threatening rollover accident? You build a $10 million dollar rollover facility, and do the rollovers yourself, giving you the data you need to build stronger, safer cars and trucks.

We’ve already talked on this blog about the importance of the crash test dummy to automotive safety, and new wireless test dummies that transmit real-time crash data will be a part of the action. But there’s more we can do to protect drivers in the event of a crash. In a rollover accident, the weight of the vehicle is transferred to the roof with extreme force, creating the potential to crush a vehicle cabin under the strain. And while rollover accidents only account for about 3 percent of all motor vehicle accidents, they account for nearly 25 percent of all motor vehicle fatalities.

As you can see, rollover testing is critical. When the facility begins its first of hundreds of annual tests in December of this year, we will put the vehicles through their paces. Four out of the five test modes to be conducted at the lab represent 80–85 percent of the vehicle rollover events that occur in the field. The test types are described as follows:

• Curb or Soil Trip: The vehicle slides sideways and is suddenly stopped following contact with a raised object (i.e., a curb) or the vehicle encounters loose soil and the wheels dig into the soil.

• Ditch Fall Over: The vehicle is travels on a steep side slope, which causes the vehicle to roll over.
• Corkscrew or Flip Over: One side of the vehicle encounters a ramp-like object such as a guardrail taper or ditch back slope.
• The Dolly Rollover: The vehicle is positioned (laterally) on an inclined dolly. The dolly travels at 30mph and is then brought to a sudden stop that causes vehicle to launch off of the dolly sideways and roll over a number of times.

The rollover test facility will help to support GM’s plan to introduce systems designed to reduce rollover injuries to all non-commercial vehicles by 2012. This facility will be the first rollover facility owned by an automotive company within North America and certainly the first for all of GM.

It’s just one more way we’re working to keep our vehicles safe and our customers safer.