External Airbags Are On The Way To Make Crashes A Little Less Unpleasant
Airbags have always been about protecting squishy human bodies from all the nasty hard bits of your car’s interior during a smash. But at their most basic level, they aim to cushion impacts and absorb energy, so why not stick a few on the outside? Volvo did it with the V40 (pictured), but that was all about protecting pedestrians. What automotive component companies ZF and TRW (now one firm thanks to a recent merger) are working on, however, is a system that’s all about softening the blow from another car.
Again, it’s an externally mounted airbag, which is about twice the size of a regular curtain airbag and is stored just under the doors. It inflates just before a side impact, and has been shown to reduce the force exerted in such a crash by as much as 30 per cent. Things have come a long way since the humble driver airbag…
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
Top Gear did it first.
Yes, yes they did
Didn’t end very well though…
Meanwhile in TVR Factory…
“Don’t crash into us”
Topgear, always at the forefront of technology!
Well they used it as a backup alarm
From from! Otherwise an interesting post… Our Disklok is the exact opposite of squishy though…
But what happens if you put a wide body kit? THAT, is intriguing…. Will it burst? Will it be fine? We sent our man, chuck norris, to a secret lab just outwards of chestershire.
In future cars will be like popcorn kernels on wheels. In an accident are cars just going to immediately pop like they’re in microwaves
Now imagine cars had little rams in the bottom to hop up to avoid a wreck and as it does all bags deploy. POP POOF like popcorn
But what happens if it hits a pedestrian, the airbag goes of too late and the pedestrian gets launched in the air?
It is clearly stated in the article that those air bags are for side impact only ;) They’re not made for drifting on public roads, and that is the only way you could deploy them by hitting a pedestrian :)
but what about parallel parking, or if something just comes close?? or if the car is put on jackstands or a lift? how does i sence if an object is going to hit it?
sounds like a good idea in theory but in situations where a car hits a pedestrian the force of an airbag going of at point blank range could have catastrophic results for the pedestrian.
It will fling them
I fear that this external air bags will make your car a write-off after every nudge on parking space
It wouldn’t go off by a nudge. For the system to really work, the car would need sensors to be able to deploy airbags the moment before collision. If a nudge set it off, that would mean the system activates after a collision happens, which wouldn’t be as efficient to reduce the energy as if the airbag deploys just before.
Kind of like the airbag in your steering wheel. It doesn’t go off because your head hit the steering wheel. It goes off before your head can. How ever, those airbags go off a split second after the initial impact.
Someone reminds when Volvo did an april fools joke about this?