German, 7 pages, 16 figures
Keywords: minor collision, side impact

The paper deals with collisions involving open or opening passenger car doors. Often, the rear impact against an open or half open door of a standing car is to be analysed. Frequently, the person having opened the door argues that the door was only left ajar and that it had been open for a while. By contrast, the driver of the impacting vehicle claims that the door was opened abruptly and widely. In principle, important conclusions could be drawn from the vehicles’ rest positions; these are, however, usually unknown. One has to rely thus on the interpretation of damage photographs. Insights on the correlation between the damage and the development of the accident can best be drawn from experiments. This paper presents results from tests on this topic. Further, it describes two experiments on the damage caused by flying glass fragments stemming from a bursting door window pane. In this test as well as in others, a striking difference between a non-moving and a moving door could be observed.