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
How does the car know that it’s going to crash ? Maybe the driver gets close to other cars with out touching them
A lot of modern cars have very complex systems of sensors and other collision prevention tech, they take into account speed, driver input and hundreds of other things so they wouldn’t activate if you were just parking or something.
So the rear airbags would deploy everytime an Audi is following them
Sensors. The system would detect cars much like they do now. When a car, or other object is moving past, the system would be able to tell that the object is not moving towards them. When an object is moving towards the vehicle, the sensors would pick it up. Depending on how fast it’s moving, it would be able to deploy airbags just before impact. The system would be able to calculate that a vehicle coming at you at 50 mph isn’t going to be able to stop within a foot or two.
It’s not rocket science to figure out how the system would basically work. You have sensors, sensors detect car. On board computer takes what the sensors are picking up, figures out how quick the vehicle is coming at you. Computer figures out impact is imminent. Airbags deployed a split second before impact.
Unbelivible. First people want robots driving cars, now they want them to turn into pufferfish
What if someone rode their bike too close and it deployed
This is just too complicated, makes the car heavier and too problematic. I’d rather prefer a car with central mounted 1 row of seats, so you have 2 seats instead of usual 5. That way, you’ll have perfect center mounted driving position and plenty of crumple zone on both sizes in case of side impact.
So no kids or anything? Sounds great!
Annnddddd, it making car heavy…
20 years from now you will just burst into a big cloud of airbags filled with gas when you hit a bump too hard
How would it differentiate a near miss from an actual impact though? It would need to have some sort of ranging device and be fast enough to tell when an actual collision is inevitable.
Anyone remember the protective crash foam from “Demolition Man” with Sylvester Stallone? I just couldn’t find any decent picture of it.
Meanwhile, people still feel the need to buy unnecessary SUV’s, which make pedestrian/cyclist injuries much worse than when hit by a lower car.