Pre-crash analysis of accidents involving turning trucks and bicyclists

Although not happening very often, accidents between turning trucks and bicycles are an important contributor to injuries of high severity levels (i.e. MAIS4+ and including fatalities) of cyclists. In order to analyse the pre‐crash situation of real‐world accidents and changed boundary conditions (e.g. introduction of certain active safety systems), the so‐called Pre Crash Matrix (PCM) was developed by the Dresden Accident Research Team (Verkehrsunfallforschung an der TU Dresden GmbH / VUFO) back in 2008. By including 5 seconds before the accident in the crash analysis, it is possible to check, for example, whether or not a sensor system would have been able to recognise the dangerous situation in time to avoid or mitigate the accident. In the current PCM version it is impossible to analyse turning trucks in order to evaluate possibilities to avoid this dangerous situation. The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology to include these accidents in the PCM and to evaluate the methodology using individual accidents. In order to analyse the pre‐crash phase of turning trucks in the context of the PCM, a tool was developed to extract the vehicle dynamics from the reconstruction tool PC‐Crash. This tool describes the infrastructure and the pre‐crash dynamics of the involved accident partners and allows simulation of the pre‐crash phase, with modified boundary conditions. The selected individual turning truck accidents demonstrate the potential of blind‐spot assistance systems for trucks.