Share this
Twitter
Myspace
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Blogmarks
Technorati
Newsvine
Ma.Gnolia
Spurl
Googlize this
Blinklist
Facebook
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
TagsSo, you're in a car and you crash. You're fine, because you have a driver's airbag. Your friend's fine, because she has a passenger airbag. But what about the poor bloke you just ran over? Well, he'll be fine too because you've conscientiously fitted a pedestrian airbag. Well done you!
The new kit has been developed at Cranfield University, which boasts the Cranfield Impact Centre (CIC) . Their research has shown that in a car crash, the luckless pedestrian is most likely to hit the bottom of the windshield, so that's where they've put the airbag. It has radar and infrared tech to "pre-detect" a collision with enough time for the bag to inflate.
"Test results indicate that the system works extremely well," said Roger Hardy, the CIC's man in charge of "vehicle crashworthiness". "When fitted to a demonstrator vehicle not originally designed with pedestrian protection in mind [a Fiat Stilo], the results were well inside all current legal criteria for pedestrian protection currently in force in Europe.
The bag has a U-shape so the driver can still see what they're doing, while protecting the pedestrian from the bottom half of the A-pillars (the fancy term for the windshield frame) - the stiffest part of the windshield. The airbag also raises the bonnet several inches to help cushion the blow, much like the Pedestrian Deployable Bonnet System on the Jaguar XKR
A standard Stilo hitting a pedestrian at 25 mph would have a Head Impact Criterion score of about 1,000 - which means an 18% chance of a life-threatening injury. That's reduced to between 692 and 945 for a Stilo fitted with the airbag and between 234 and 682 when the raised bonnet system is included too.
The airbag's activated by a pyrotechnic device, which means no stored air or gas supply to worry about. Hardy reckons production of the system could begin in as few as five years, and it shouldn't add much to the price of the car. And who knows, maybe that pedestrian you'll save five years down the road will be an eccentric billionaire who showers you with gold in gratitude for your thoughtfulness.
(Absolute Gadget does not endorse running people over for financial gain.)
