Road traffic injuries have become a major social issue. With the development of technology, legislation and safety consciousness, the fatal rate of brain and chest injuries has been declined. However, as to prevent foot and ankle injuries of occupants still no effectual protective devices have been developed. In this paper, research progress on foot and ankle injuries of occupants was reviewed, which found out that most of such injuries in the frontal motor vehicle crashes occurred more easily to the drivers, which was possibly due to the special loading on their lower extremity during braking. Although there still exists a continuing debate about taxonomy of the frontal motor vehicle crashes, researchers have approached unified understanding that foot and ankle injuries are usually caused in the real-world narrow object frontal crashes. Until now, studies on foot and ankle injury and its protective mechanisms in various types of crashes are rarely conducted. A combination of the in-vitro experiment and computational modeling would be an ideal method to solve this issue.