A method is disclosed for managing variation in acceleration values obtained from a vehicle acceleration sensor for use in on-board computer based crash evaluation algorithm. Sources contributing to the variation are identified and a determination is made of the magnitude of the variation from each source to a selected multiple of a standard deviation, for example, 3 to 6 . The variation for each source is suitably combined to produce a database of acceleration-time history with the combined variations for use in calibrating and or validating a candidate crash algorithm.