Vehicle Safety
The Centre for Automotive Safety Research (CASR) conducts research and advanced vehicle testing in state-of-the-art facilities, with a focus on investigating road crashes, injury prevention and future autonomous safety technologies.
Our laboratory is operated by an experienced team with the technical expertise to advise on, design, conduct and adapt impact testing to suit any client’s requirements. Some of the organisations and companies we have collaborated with include:
- the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP)
- government authorities
- vehicle manufacturers
- bull-bar and other automotive component manufacturers
- organisations with an interest in biomechanics.
Pedestrian protection
CASR also conducts vehicle testing with a specific focus on improving pedestrian protection—a critical area of road safety, with pedestrians accounting for approximately 17% of people killed or seriously injured on our roads annually.
A key aspect of this work is performing ANCAP testing. ANCAP has raised the bar for vehicle manufacturers by insisting they meet a minimum pedestrian-protection level in order to receive a high safety rating. Complementing this, we also use our cutting-edge laboratory to reconstruct and study actual pedestrian crashes. This has enabled our researchers to relate, for example, various pedestrian head injuries to specific causative forces.
These activities, combined with the unique data we have compiled on real-world pedestrian injury, has enabled us to build a knowledge bank that can inform vehicle and road system design, and help ensure greater pedestrian protection in the future.
Autonomous vehicles
CASR conducts several activities that can be combined to provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of new safety technologies. Routinely collected police crash data and injury data can be combined with our in-depth investigations and controlled field tests to predict the effect of emerging technologies on safety outcomes for the population.
CASR is also in active collaboration with other researchers within the University and the Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences who contribute to autonomous vehicle research.