Reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) has been receiving increasing attention for achieving high safety and reliability in engineering design. Sequential optimization and reliability assessment (SORA), as one of the efficient single-loop methods, decouples an RBDO problem into sequential deterministic optimization and reliability analysis. An enhanced SORA (ESORA) method is proposed with the aim of further improving the computational efficiency for RBDO, considering both cases of constant and varying variances of random design inputs while keeping the single-loop framework. Vehicle side impact example is used to test and compare the efficiency of the proposed method with existing approaches.