Before the summer break, the secretariat of this group requested to indicate interest in participating in the round robin vehicle test program with the three master FlexPLI’s. In the meantime the vice-chair of this IG distributed a schedule for interested organizations in Europe, USA and Korea (document GTR9-4-17). Action items A-3-06 and A-3-07 are closed.

In addition, the vice-chair provided guidelines how to perform round robin tests smoothly and effectively (document GTR9-4-08). The round robin tests should give answers on repeatability, reproducibility and durability when used in real vehicle impacts. One focus is of course the confirmation of the updated certification corridors. After some discussion the following was agreed:

• ► After a maximum of 9 vehicle tests a re-certification should be done, preferably with both, the pendulum and the inverse test. In case one organization cannot do both tests, the respective master FlexPLI should be re-certified with the pendulum test at least.
• ► A re-certification should be done when the test result exceeds a certain measurement value (10% above the threshold).
• ► A logbook is to be prepared accompanying the master legs during their travel for the round robin test series. This logbook should contain information regarding re-certification results, all observations etc., but no vehicle test results.

Details were agreed and recorded during the meeting and will be added to the FlexPLI master legs (document GTR9-4-22) ASAP. BASt/BGS Boehme & Gehring are responsible to circulate a logbook ASAP (action item A-4-06).

BASt presented first test results of tests with the FlexPLI prototypes and master legs against series cars (document GTR9-4-14). The production cars were the same as those which were used during the TEG activities (FlexPLI prototypes). Thus, the vehicle behavior is assumed to be identical. It appears that the master legs tend to lower output responses than the prototypes. The repeatability is satisfactory for the master legs.

NHTSA mentioned that the lower output of the measurements should be discussed under the issue of threshold / criteria.

Japan insisted that the flexible legform impactor prototype’s conditions were not always on an acceptable level. It was pointed out that the results from tests with brand-new flexible legform impactors (representing the master leg level) shall be used for this discussion.