Electric vehicles introduce new considerations for pedestrian safety because their lower operating noise at low speeds may reduce pedestrian detectability in urban traffic environments. This study proposes a simulation-based integrated active–passive pedestrian protection framework for electric vehicles by linking automatic emergency braking, active hood deployment, and post-crash head injury assessment. A total of 688 valid pedestrian–vehicle crash records from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database were analyzed, and 5 representative pedestrian crash scenarios were constructed through clustering-informed scenario screening and a benchmark pedestrian AEB scenario. The scenarios were reconstructed in a PreScan–Simulink co-simulation environment to evaluate a time-to-collision-based AEB strategy, while the active hood system was assessed using multi-body dynamics simulation and finite element head impact analysis. The AEB results showed that three scenarios were avoided before pedestrian contact, whereas two remained unavoidable, with residual impact speeds of approximately 31.5 km/h and 46 km/h. The hood reached a stable deployed posture within approximately 0.1 s under the modeled conditions. The HIC15 results at eight selected impact points showed that speed reduction and hood deployment generally reduced head injury metrics, but full compliance with the reference HIC15 threshold of 1000 was not achieved at all points. These findings suggest that the proposed strategy can improve simulated pedestrian head protection performance under selected electric vehicle crash scenarios, while further structural optimization, experimental validation, and cost–benefit assessments are still required.
MA et al. (Sat,) studied this question.