indexing crash worthiness, crash aggressivity, and total secondary safety for major car brands: a case study of iran

A growing body of research is being conducted all over the world to evaluate and compare the safety impacts of different car brands. this issue has also received a considerable attention among the safety experts in iran, where the number of road fatalities is around 16,500 lives per year. this study aims at indexing crash worthiness, crash aggressivity, and total secondary safety of the 20 most prevalently used passenger car brands of iranian fleet. for this purpose, the data pertaining to 167,759 crashes and 335,518 drivers involved in those crashes that occurred in iran from 2009 to 2012 were used. binomial logistic regression model was applied to define the above-mentioned indices based on driver’s injury severity level. the results showed that most of the domestic brands have a poorer performance than the foreign ones in all three indices. furthermore, it was revealed that kia and suzuki have a better performance and sepand and pride have a poorer performance compared to the other brands. our findings might also be integrated with the findings of other similar studies around the world. this could be helpful for car manufacturers both in iran and across the world to benchmark the best performing car brand in vehicle safety domain and improve the designing of their own car brands.