Automotive Industry Trends
July 2003
Industry Improves Crash Protection with New, Advanced Technology
You walk into a dealership, test-drive the new sports car that caught your eye and decide to buy it. You choose the color, the engine and – because you deserve it – a plush leather interior. You have a couple thousand dollars left for extras. What’ll it be? An upgraded audio system or a moon roof? What about the long list of safety features available as options? Some of these features cost a lot, others very little. Which ones do you need?
Car shoppers need a crash course in occupant protection. And they need to get smart now, because the gizmos are getting smarter, says Dr. David Viano, principal of consulting firm ProBiomechanics LLC and former safety specialist for General Motors and Saab.
“Smart air bags developed by the automotive industry build on the success of de-powered bags introduced some years ago to curb injuries from this important safety device,” he says. “The new smart bags sense the difference between an adult occupant, a child and an empty seat, note the crash severity, and inflate only as much as needed to mitigate the impact. Weight and tension sensors under seats and in seatbelts ‘see’ who’s in the car.”
Siemens, TRW and Motorola are making lasers, 3-D cameras and electrical fields that determine an occupant’s sitting position and size. Position and size have been the main factors in injuries and fatalities from air bags, and these factors remain sticky points. Even smart bags struggle to distinguish a grownup from a child. For instance, a thin, short woman sitting out of position can fool the system into thinking she’s a child, or not there at all. Companies are hard at work perfecting smart bags to comply with federal mandates over the next one to three years.
New Devices Improve Occupant Safety
Meanwhile, the industry has rolled out anti-whiplash headrests that reduce neck injuries in rear-end accidents. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says its recent studies show that active headrests in Saabs, Volvos and Buicks cut neck injuries by almost half.
“These new headrests are an extremely encouraging development,” says Dr. Viano, “because whiplash protection is the single largest component of car insurance premiums.”
He also cites anti-submarining ramps, positioned in the front of car seats to provide effective torso restraint and work with air bags. Even good old seatbelts are becoming newfangled. Pretensioners tighten up any slack in belt webbing in the event of a crash. While the conventional locking mechanism in a retractor keeps the seatbelt from extending farther, the pretensioner actually pulls in on the belt, moving the passenger into the best crash position in his or her seat. Pretensioners typically work in tandem with locking mechanisms, not in place of them.
“The next generation of technology will introduce slack removal systems activated by radar or panic braking, just before pretensioning occurs,” Dr. Viano says. “This is significant because it’ll bridge crash avoidance and crash protection, long considered separate and distinct categories of auto safety. We’ll view the two as we should, on one and the same continuum.”
The Rub: Getting Us to Buy Safety
Even with better bags, better belts and bedazzling new safety devices, one big challenge will remain: getting us to buy these things. And use them.
Though we say safety is most important, when we’re in the showroom, our wallets often say otherwise. In a recent survey by CNW Marketing Research, which tracks industry trends, consumers ranked side air bags as only the 12th most important attribute in buying a vehicle, behind monthly payment and interior comfort.
“The facts about safety systems need to be accurately covered in the news and conveyed to the public to gain understanding,” suggests Dr. Viano in a technical paper he authored while at General Motors. 1 “Misleading information about either safety benefits of crash-protection components or injury risks, which may be infrequent in comparison to overall safety benefit, may cause occupants to reduce their overall driving safety by failing to properly use inherently safe technologies to protect themselves and their families.”
1From “Effectiveness of Safety Belts and Airbags in Preventing Fatal Injury,” by David C. Viano, Biomedical Science Dept., General Motors Research Laboratories, Warren Mich.