“Our mission: to save even more lives around the world”

Plastic and metal are crushed. Fragments fly through the air. A cacophony of sounds – a brief creak, an ear-piercing screech and a dull thud – fills the huge hall, deafeningly loud, like a gunshot, just more intricate and muted. A moving barrier traveling at 80 kilometers per hour rams the rear end of the white Audi Q8 e-tron, shoving it forward several meters. Then: standstill and silence. What’s left is a vehicle with a demolished rear end that can teach us a lot.

Survey after survey has shown that safety is one of customers’ top priorities when they purchase a vehicle. The issue has a broad range of facets to it: “Our ‘active safety’ systems ⁴ can already help prevent accidents in individual cases,” Martin Friedrichsen says. “But you will still have situations in which accidents are unavoidable. This is where ‘passive safety’ ⁴ systems go to work. As a global premium manufacturer, we have made safety a very high priority. The company consciously invests in vehicle safety development, and we have been working from the very beginning on high standards designed to protect vehicle passengers.” This commitment has now become even more obvious at Audi: A new vehicle safety center in which Audi has combined all of its crash expertise has been opened on the site of the incampus in the east of Ingolstadt.

The results of the rear-end crash test in the new hall have now been documented in detail. Even though the 220 vehicle-safety employees crashed about 1,100 vehicles in 2023 – along with conducting about 20,000 virtual accident simulations – the seconds that immediately precede and follow a crash are anything but routine. “In the blink of the eye, we see whether 85 years of crash-safety research and development pay off,” Martin Friedrichsen says. “As early as 1938, engineers of DKW, one of the four founding brands of today’s AUDI AG, conducted rollover and side-impact tests with DKW models. These are considered to be the first crash tests in the history of the automobile. Historic motion pictures taken at the time show how an engineer is able to easily open the door of an empty vehicle that has just rolled over several times.” The ability to open a door following a rollover accident remains a critically important factor to passengers and first responders today – decades later (VDA).

Andreas Schuller is also an expert for vehicle safety requirements in the Chinese market. “China is evolving from a follower to a leader market. The standards have recently become higher and more demanding.” There are two primary reasons for this shift: China has not just one, but two very active organizations⁵ that set the agenda. And they also focus on specific regional safety aspects that differ from those in other countries. Why? Andreas Schuller says: “The different requirements are increasingly arising from local accident research and traffic monitoring. In China, the volume of traffic and the transportation infrastructure are different. Urban areas are filled with many small vehicles like motor scooters, e-scooters and bicycles with smaller wheel sizes. The result: In our tests we use a different dummy configuration, different pedestrian safety requirements and – depending on the particular Chinese organization – different barriers in side-impact crashes.”
 

In particular, the issue of “integral safety” is gaining momentum as a result of the activities of Chinese testing organizations. “By integral safety, we mean tests in which active and passive safety systems⁴ are tested together in the same scenario and not individually as we have done in the past,” Andreas Schuller says. The focus is on protecting passengers, even if they may not have an ideal sitting position. This may be the case if, for instance, a driver applies the brakes suddenly immediately before a crash or attempts to steer around a potential crash (see the infographic). “We can now conduct such complex evaluations of accident scenarios ourselves in the new crash hall – thanks to state-of-the-art measuring systems and equipment.”

“European organizations and manufacturers moved to the forefront in this area at an early stage and focused not only on producing safe vehicles, but also on creating the safest possible traffic conditions,” Birgit Arneth says. This facilitates both passenger safety and the least possible harm to other individuals involved in an accident (see infographic).

The effort to create the best possible interplay – not only in terms of pedestrians, but also of other vehicles – is reflected in the range of different crash barriers being used in Audi’s new vehicle safety center. Arneth says: “Deformable barriers enable us to simulate accident scenarios more realistically. Unlike a crash into a fixed block of concrete that does not budge one single centimeter, these structures simulate another vehicle more closely.” As a result, experts can determine whether the test vehicle has features like body structures that could harm other road users.

The company’s second priority is its desire for the stipulations in the test protocols to be used to help minimize the effect of accidents. “We believe this information does so when scientific findings about the causes and consequences of accidents is considered in the requirements of organizations and the test protocols are updated to reflect this knowledge,” Michael Broscheit says. Audi also contributes the knowledge that the Audi Accident Research Unit (AARU) has gained to its discussions with consumer protection organizations for this purpose. The AARU, which was established in 1998, works with physicians and psychologists at the University Medical Center in Regensburg to analyze real traffic accidents and develop optimization potential with the help of these scientific findings. “We naturally share the findings made by the AARU – most recently with CATARC ⁸ in China. Audi recently became a member of the expert committee at the testing organization there – one of the first Western companies to do so.”

In the months ahead, the vehicle safety teams will intensively get to know and use the new crash hall in Ingolstadt. After all: “Audi will introduce many new models in 2024 and 2025,” says Martin Friedrichsen, the Head of Vehicle Safety. “This means one thing for us: A new vehicle must perform effectively for consumer protection organizations within short intervals. For this reason, our new vehicle safety center has opened at exactly the right time.”