Nissan Advanced Crash Laboratory Begins Operations

September 1st, 2005

Nissan Motor announced on August 31 that it has begun operations at its newly constructed Nissan Advanced Crash Laboratory (NACL) located at the company’s Oppama Proving Ground in Yokosuka City, 50 kilometers southwest of Tokyo. The 40,000-square-meter, state-of-the-art laboratory will be used for testing safety performance in vehicle-to-vehicle crashes and occupant protection performance in rollover accidents.

The facility will help Nissan implement what it calls “Safety Shield.” Introduced in 2004, the Safety Shield approach includes technologies that will help prevent accidents and minimize damage should an accident occur. Nissan believes that the driver is key to improved safety when it comes to helping to prevent an accident from occurring. Their focus, therefore, is on supporting the driver with features that helps him or her avoid accident in the first place.

At NACL, Nissan can perform a wide variety of tests that reproduce vehicle-to-vehicle collisions:

• frontal collisions at angles from 85 to 185 degrees in 5-degree increments;
• side collisions; and
• collisions between vehicles travelling in the same direction at oblique angles of 5, 10, 15, 30, 45, 60 and 75 degrees.

Nissan can also simulate four types of rollover crashes, including:

• a dolly rollover test that simulates a rollover curb impact crash with the vehicle in a fixed position on a dolly,
• a trip-over test that simulates an accident where a vehicle spins and slips sideways until it comes in contact with a curb or some other formation that causes it to roll over,
• a ditch rollover test that simulates an accident where a vehicle leaves the road, travels down a sloped embankment at an oblique angle and rolls over, and
• a corkscrew test that simulates an accident where the wheels on one side run up on the center divider or some other structure, causing the vehicle to tip and roll over.

The tests were developed by Nissan based on real-world accident analysis.

Long-term commitments to safety

Nissan has set a goal of halving the number of traffic fatalities or serious injuries involving Nissan vehicles in Japan by 2015 compared with 1995. As of 2003, Nissan had reduced the number of fatal and serious injuries by 22% compared with 1995, indicating that steady progress is being made toward the attainment of its goal.

For more information, contact Sumi Shimizu, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., 310-771-5803.

Entry Filed under: Safety Test, Test Labs