With road safety more important to legislators and consumers than ever before, the reduction of the effects of impact injury to vehicle occupants and pedestrians, is becoming of ever increasing importance. Road accident deaths in 2004 stood at 43500 in the European Union (source: CARE database) and around 42600 in the US (source: FARS database), with hundreds of thousands more suffering serious injuries.

The past few years have seen a constant, albeit slight, decrease in the number of road fatalities, which the development of safer cars has certainly contributed to, it is clear that those manufacturers that invest heavily in safety related R&D create a competitive advantage over those who don't.

The ability of a vehicle to protect its passengers in this situation, or its crashworthiness, is of vital importance to design criteria. This is achieved by legislation, in the form of regulations such as ECE R94, R95, FMVSS 201, 208, 214 for occupant protection. Public awareness has also increased through programmes such as IIHS vehicle ratings and NCAPs (New Car Assessment Programmes) in Europe, US, Australia, Japan and China. Their aim is to provide consumers with information on occupant safety of the latest car models, and to put pressure on manufacturers to permanently improve safety performance. In the competitive automotive market, the industry is increasingly using its products' safety features as a marketing tool.

For example, Euro NCAP is an important consumer crash testing programme which was introduced in 1997 by TRL (Transport Research Laboratory). It was developed out of real life accident statistics, and has continuously been enlarged. It is supported by five European governments and many European motoring and consumer organizations. This programme includes frontal offset, side impact, pole and pedestrian tests.

Cellbond's deformable crash test barriers are a crucial element used for both passive safety regulation and consumer information tests worldwide. At Cellbond, we aim to continuously improve our products and service, as well as cooperating with research and industry organizations in order to develop new and improved test tools barriers. We offer the full range of deformable aluminum honeycomb barriers, and were the first to do so. Many of the existing barrier types were developed with essential involvement from Cellbond.