This paper reports on results from a study of characteristics for 3D soft surrogate vehicle targets. Such targets are used extensively for testing and verification of optical sensor systems for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Automated Driving. However, the influence of wear-and-tear on the vehicle target is not well known. Consequently, no clear requirement exists on how many collisions a soft target can be exposed to before it no longer performs well.

Important characteristics for optical sensor systems are surface reflectance in the relevant wavelength range and geometry of the soft target. We report on measurements of spectral reflectivity and geometry performed before, during and after an accelerated ageing campaign involving 100 rear-end collisions at 50 km/h. The reflectivity was found to change very little while the geometry was strongly affected.