Saving you from safety
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2000-07-29
The U.S. federal government has introduced new rules for airbag testing, rules that are likely to promote the use of sophisticated sensing technologies to make airbags safer.
The new test requirements prescribe a greater variety of test dummies and crash tests designed to ensure that the airbags themselves will be less dangerous in deployment, especially in low-impact collisions. Airbags work best in severe frontal crashes, and when vehicle occupants are ideally seated. Their explosive deployment is intended to fill the spaces between passengers and dash or steering wheel in the milliseconds following a crash. The problem is, if those vehicle occupants are unbelted or seated too near the bags, the danger from the airbags can be great.
So far, airbag deployments have killed about 160 people in North America, often in relatively low-severity crashes in which serious injury would otherwise be unlikely. One of the issues in these fatalities has been that airbags were designed to deploy more powerfully to compensate for the fact that drivers and passengers were often not wearing their safety belts.
Another problem with earlier bags was that they were designed with the "average" American male in mind-about 180 pounds weight, average height-the "50th percentile male." Tests of these airbags were conducted with crash test dummies that represented only this body size.
The new rules change all this. Test dummies representing small adult females, 3- to 6-year-old children, and 1-year-old infants will now be used. A wider variety of crash configurations will also be used in testing.
The new test requirements are likely to spawn a variety of sophisticated in-car technologies in vehicles of the future. These will include sensors that take into account a person's weight and distance from the airbag before either inflating or not inflating. The airbags will be required to reduce the likelihood of injury in low impact collisions or not to deploy at all if a driver or passenger is out of position.
The speed bump
One of the major issues in developing the new tests was whether the principal crash tests would be conducted at 30 mph (about 50 km/h) or 25 mph (40 km/h). Some experts claimed that if tests were conducted at 25 mph, the airbag designers would not be encouraged to develop the kind of advanced airbags that would be effective in higher impact crashes and still be capable of avoiding the injury threats to driver and passengers. Opponents of the 30 mph tests were worried that the higher speeds would mean a return to higher-powered airbags.
In the end, the lower speed test was selected. Brian O'Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, believes that this was the right decision. Studies based on an IIHS review of federal data files on deaths of drivers involved in frontal crashes indicate that "none of the 'failures'-that is, cases when airbags didn't prevent death-occurred because of insufficient airbag energy."
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration favored the 30 mph tests and didn't agree with all the arguments against them. However, in the end, the 25 mph test prevailed, but NHTSA says it has reached "no final conclusion about the appropriateness of that test in the long run."
A more complete report on the new airbag ruling can be found in the IIHS publication Status
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