Infiniti Crash Testing

Manufacturer Testing

All of our vehicles meet and surpass all Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Before vehicles can be sold in the United States, they must pass a series of tests. These include front, rear, and side barrier impacts, some head-on and some at an angle. The tests are designed to evaluate different aspects of a vehicle's design.

New Vehicle Development Process

Our engineers conduct crash testing throughout the new vehicle development process. In the earliest stages, the engineers use computers to simulate collisions and analyze the results. As the process moves forward, prototype vehicles are built and then crashed. After engineers and technicians pore over the results and make design modifications, improved prototypes are crashed again.

Even when a car is produced, the crashing continues. Production vehicles get sent to test labs where engineers study the impact results for final confirmation before sale.

The goal of this testing, which is overseen by Nissan Technical Centers in the United States and Japan, is to expose vehicles to the wide range of collisions similar to what can happen on the road.

Included are frontal crashes into rigid barriers at a variety of speeds, both head-on and at a 30 angle. There are "offset" crashes in which only a portion of the vehicle's front end strikes a barrier. There are also side-impact and rear car-to-car crashes.

Engineers also perform interior "sled tests" using only the passenger compartment. Instead of hitting a barrier, the sled containing the passenger compartment is accelerated and decelerated very rapidly to simulate a collision.

This approach is used to look at seat belt performance and to study the movement of occupants under crash conditions, also known as occupant kinematics.

Nissan Advanced Crash Laboratory (NACL)

In 2005, the Nissan Advanced Crash Laboratory (NACL) was opened, a state-of-the-art laboratory to test and evaluate safety performance in vehicle-to-vehicle and rollover crashes and to research occupant protection performance.

At NACL, tests designed to reproduce vehicle-to-vehicle crashes can be conducted over a wide range of collision angles, including frontal collisions, side-impact collisions, and oblique-angle crashes between vehicles traveling in opposite directions.

NACL can also evaluate performance in four types of rollover crash modes:

 - Dolly rollover test simulates a rollover curb impact crash with the vehicle in a fixed position on a dolly.

 - Trip-over test simulates an accident where a vehicle spins and slips sideways until it comes in contact with a curb or some other obstacle that causes it to roll over.

 - Ditch rollover test simulates an accident where a vehicle leaves the road, travels down a sloped embankment at an oblique angle and rolls over.

 - Corkscrew test 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.

We developed these tests based on real-world accident analysis.

Other Testing

In addition to conducting our own crash tests, engineers also monitor testing performed by government and industry groups.

These include tests performed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Because of the limitations inherent in individual tests, however, our engineers do not make design decisions merely to achieve a high score.