Abstract
Recently the objective of vehicle design was focused on the crash safety and the energy saving. For the energy saving vehicle structures must be light weight, but for the crash safety some energy absorbing elements must be added. In this paper hybrid structure which consists of a steel and a FRP was studied on the energy absorption characteristics under the impact load by finite element method. Test results of the other researchers were compared with that of computer simulation on this simple hybrid structure. Side rail of vehicle front structure was replaced with hybrid materials for the application of the vehicle structure. 35mph frontal crash simulation was performed with hybrid structure and with conventional steel structure. By the adoption of hybrid structure, the improvement of energy absorption characteristics and reduction of weight was observed under the frontal crash simulation.