Vehicles Standards (TW2)

Identification of Vehicles representative of the fleet on the road in Europe as of 2023 – updated (TW2)

Are the vehicle characteristics provided by EN 1317 for crash testing actually representative of the traffic circulating on European roads today?

Can a vehicle weighing 900 kg be considered representative of the light vehicles on the road? And are the permitted heavy vehicles, particularly buses, representative of those on the road? And, in any case, can the tests performed with such vehicles be considered sufficiently precautionary?

The U.S. tests, for example, in addition to a light-vehicle test and a heavy-vehicle test, include a test with a Pickup truck, a vehicle particularly representative of American traffic, which is often the most challenging test for the device.

With the data available on vehicles circulating in Europe, Intoroads is conducting a study to analyze the characteristics of European traffic in order to understand whether the vehicles provided for in EN 1317 are indeed representative or whether it might not also be appropriate to evaluate the behavior of the barrier for impacts with different vehicles.

The aim of the work was to verify the current characteristics of the circulating fleet in order to define meaningful characteristics, i.e., capable of adequately representing circulating vehicles. The document will be made public according to media channels and made available to standardization bodies.

The work is concluded and the results are available.