Abstract: Based on the development of mini electric passenger car made by the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation Motor, in this paper, the mass allocation and the compartment packaging of the mini electric car are discussed and compared to that of traditional motor car. The load path and the available crash space were specially designed with respect to the concentrated large mass, and then the frontal structure was optimized through Comput Aidd Engineering (CAE) simulations. The results show that the car achieves good structure crashworthiness in full frontal and offset frontal impacts. The load path and structure design method described in this paper can be used for this kind of electric cars’ development.

Key words: electric passenger car, stracture crashworthiness, crash zone, load path