Afterwards, Mr. Roth presented document TF-BTA-7-09. He explained that his company did a case-by-case analysis of accident data to assess whether the injury risk outside the existing corners of bumper is higher compared to the area inside and whether an extension of the bumper test area would be beneficial. Mr. Roth explained that in average about 74 % of the vehicle front ends are already covered by the current test area. Outside this area, neither the number of injuries in total nor the number of severe injuries is higher than inside but a trend to a lower frequency can be seen for the outside area. For vehicles launched to the market after 2006, there are even no severe injuries.

(Notes of the secretary: Mr. Roth confirmed afterwards that the one AIS2 case outside the current bumper test area for after 2006 vehicles was included by mistake since the respective injuries were not caused by the vehicle. Mr. Roth provided a corrected version of his presentation (see document TF-BTA-7-09r1).

Further comments on this, not part of the official discussion in the meeting: Mr. Zander commented on Mr. Roth’s presentation that the one case, where an AIS 2 leg injury (tibia fracture) occurred outside of the current bumper test area, reports an injury where the source is not fully clear. However, a later investigation showed that for this case it can be seen, that a pedestrian contact occurred outside the bumper test zone. Furthermore, spot checks of accidents coded with pedestrian contact inside the bumper test area resulted in actual pedestrian contacts outside this area. Mr. Roth commented on this again that the contact cannot necessarily be seen as the source of injury for this case, GIDAS clearly states that the injuries are caused by the road surface. However, it is common practice that, in case of uncertain details, cases are not considered for the analyses.) However, Mr. Roth also stated that (accident (and injury) numbers generally are low and therefore may not be representative.

Mr. Zander stated that still 4 out of 21 injuries (Note of the secretary: May need to read 3 out of 20, following the discussion of Messrs. Roth and Zander noted above.) are outside of 60° bumper corners but that BASt would strongly recommend to do something to include all accidents. Also, he wished a case-by-case analysis to include the details of the cases. The secretary noted that BASt had initially volunteered to do this analysis (see minutes of the 5th meeting) and that Mr. Zander had already explained in the 6th meeting that this may be too time consuming. Mr. Roth added that, however, the majority of the cases is already covered.

Mr. Zander wondered if it could be concluded from the presentation of Mr. Roth that the bumper test area could be defined in a very pragmatic and easily applicable way by just using 74 % of the entire vehicle width. This idea was rejected by Mr. Roth, referring to the information shown by industry in this group regarding the limitations of the impactor.