  When explaining to a lay audience the magnitude of forces or accelerations
imparted to vehicles or experienced by vehicle occupants during a motor vehicle
collision, it is often helpful to recast the critical results in terms of other
physical systems or impact configurations which will reproduce the equivalent
dynamics of the subject accident to serve as a conceptual aid for the audience.
In this article, we present the basis for such equivalents and explicitly
demonstrate, using two physics simulation software packages, that such
equivalents are based on nothing more than the application of the laws of
physics.
