Front impact analysis and design improvement for an electric all-terrain vehicle

Environmental friendly designs are one of the major focuses recently. Many automobile manufacturers have been continuing designing and producing environmental friendly vehicles. An existing combustion engine all-terrain vehicle was modified and converted to an electric street vehicle. The goal of this study is to analyze this electric vehicle, to develop a lightweight design improving its cruising abilities and to retrofit the front structure to enhance the frontal crashworthiness. Structure modification is needed due to different design requirements between two distinct vehicle functions, one for all-terrain rough road and the other for street drive. With the limited power provided by the given batteries, light weight design is critical. A design is proposed with a new bumper and a modified structure to absorb the impact energy. The proposed structure improved the head injury criteria by 35%, increased the residual space by 59%, and raised the energy absorption by 27%.