"And now for something completely Different" - Volvo Innovation: External Airbags Could Save Pedestrian Lives.(Spiegel).Engineers are well aware that humans and cars make for unequal adversaries when they collide. The difference, says Thomas Broberg, is primarily a matter of their construction: "Cars are hard and people are soft." Broberg is head of safety development for Swedish car manufacturer Volvo, and he's currently working on making cars less hard. The new Volvo V40 will be the world's first mass-produced passenger car with an external airbag that deploys in front of the windshield if it hits a pedestrian.
With the V40, Volvo is offering something long advocated for by car critics and organizations that promote alternative forms of transportation: safety improvements to benefit those not sitting inside a car, the individuals for whom cars pose the greatest danger. The number of road casualties in Germany, especially the number of pedestrians killed, increased again last year. In 2011, 612 pedestrians lost their lives in traffic, 136 more than in the previous year.
European Union regulations on pedestrian safety have been in force for seven years now, but these rules lag far behind the goals initially laid out by the European Commission. Car hoods and the front end of auto bodies are now required to be more yielding, but originally measures were to be introduced to address the rigid metal frame around a car's windshield as well. Crash researchers know that is the area that causes the most serious head injuries, injuries which are often fatal.
It's not easy, though, to make the windshield frame more yielding. The frame plays an important role in the rigidity of the auto body as a whole. It protects the passengers if the car flips over. Hence an airbag is the only feasible way to cushion a pedestrian's impact as much as possible.
Yet the same manufacturers who provide front and side airbags to protect their customers have balked at going to such lengths to improve pedestrians' chances of surviving an accident. The fact that a small company working out of Sweden is the only manufacturer to achieve such a thing casts a rather unflattering light on automobile empires such as Volkswagen, a company which achieves profits in the double-digit billions, yet does almost nothing to protect pedestrians. It's unlikely that Volvo's entire development budget for its pedestrian airbag was more than the €18 million ($23 million) which VW's CEO Martin Winterkorn personally earned last year.Hmmmm......I can only applaud Volvo for it's innovation!Read the full story here.
No comments:
Post a Comment