Innovative Electric Vehicle Body Design Based on Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Side Impact Conditions

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A version of an electric vehicle was developed and designed for the US market on the basis of the required domestic body structure. When compared with the original car, the new car body design leads to two major technical difficulties. First, the installation of high-voltage components such as the battery pack and other new energy sources increases the vehicle weight and occupies a great deal of its structural space; this limits the impact paths and the use of traditional structural designs, which greatly increases the design difficulty. Second, the USA, as an advanced automobile-using country, has well-developed laws and regulations for collision standards, vehicle operating conditions and evaluation standards. Using a combination of butterfly diagram analysis, bending moment management, section forces and other computer-aided simulation and analysis techniques, this paper presents a body structure design that can achieve a “GOOD” evaluation under the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) side impact body structure conditions by optimizing the force transfer path, the B-pillar deformation mode and the threshold support structure. The threshold support structure supports realization of the “GOOD” rating for IIHS side impact and helps the body to meet the crash requirements of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard FMVSS214 and the US New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) requirements for side impact at 32 km/h and 75° angular pole impact.