Numerous efforts have been made to replicate pedestrian-car crashes experimentally or numerically to study the pedestrian injury biomechanics for developing countermeasures for pedestrian protection. This overview summarises such efforts towards pedestrian safety and available surrogates used in optimisation of pedestrian-friendly vehicle designs. This paper provides not only available physical surrogates (impactors and pedestrian dummies) used by different regulatory agencies, but also a collection of various numerical models used to predict injury responses in car-pedestrian impacts. Additionally, an overview of many reported cadaveric experiments performed as sustained by pedestrians in car crashes is presented. A validation matrix is proposed for correlating existing/future numerical models with available cadaveric test data. This is to ensure development of high predictive quality FE whole body human models to assess injury risk to pedestrians in car crashes, and in turn for continued improvement over design of pedestrian friendly vehicle front-end and effective countermeasures for pedestrian protection.