Accuracy, robustness and efficiency are always the fundamental requirements for engineering applications. Adaptive method of finite element analysis can serve these goals if it can efficiently deliver high accuracy solutions to the engineering problems. Crash worthiness analysis involves highly nonlinear transient dynamics problems with large deformation of thin shell structures, elastic- plasticity, surface contact, etc. This report presents case studies of crash analysis using adaptive method implemented in LSDYNA, commercial software of explicit finite element. The change of normal angle between the neighboring shell elements is used as an engineering error indicator. Examples of structural component crash simulations are used to illustrate the adaptive procedure of explicit finite element analysis and to examine the quality of adaptive refinement with comparisons to uniform refinement. It is observed that solutions by adaptive method can compare to those using a uniform mesh of the same level but use much less CPU time. For this type of transient dynamics problem, a backward loop to resume the analysis at an earlier time with a refined mesh is necessary to avoid or reduce error accumulation. A suitable time period of refinement is important for the engineering applications. The error indicator based on shell element normal rotation is found to be effective for the solutions of bending dominated crashworthiness applications.