airbags are the safety feature you hope you will never have to see
in the 30 years from 1987 to 2017 airbags saved 50 457 lives more than enough to fill yankee stadium
today few would question their presence in cars but airbags which are required in
all cars sold in america are there because of a decades-long argument between safety advocates
who believed the devices could save countless lives and skeptics who worried that potential
costs and dangers might outweigh benefits their story illustrates how new safety technology
and safety regulations can inspire controversy and even bitter fighting
the invention of the airbag is attributed to a few different people in the 1950s there was a navy man
named john hetrick who came up with this idea of an air pillow an air cushion and he actually had
that patented another inventor was a man named alan breed initially focused on technology for
military clients breed used his knowledge of sensors and controlled explosions to invent the
world's first airbag system in 1968. breed founded the company key safety systems which was acquired
by another safety equipment company ningbo joyson in 2016. getting airbags into cars was a challenge
car manufacturers really weren't interested in talking a lot about safety if we talk about safety
then we have to acknowledge that cars might not be safe and that was a very a difficult situation for
them manufacturers did experiment with them ford tested passenger side airbags on some
mercury montereys in 1971 and offered them as an option on the same car in 1972 gm fitted about 1
000 1973 chevrolet impalas with experimental airbags and allowed fleet customers such as
insurance companies to test them when the vehicle research center here opened in the early 1990s
our inaugural crash test was in 1973 chevy impala with that that special airbag despite the fact
that the cars were 20 years old at the time of the test with dead batteries and other non-functioning
parts the airbags deployed perfectly and so we proved that more than 20 years later
that airbag still functioned properly and provided additional protection for occupants in that
vehicle gm offered airbags as a 180 to 300 option on some vehicles from 1974 through 1976 the first
gm production car with the driver side airbag sold as an option was the 1974 oldsmobile toronado
despite these early experiments there was a lot of resistance to putting airbags in cars
nitsa was created in 1970 and in that same year issued a rule to make airbags mandatory in all
new cars joan claybrook a safety advocate who was working at nitsa around that time and who later
headed the agency said the rule met with a lot of opposition the final rule was finally issued in
the fall of 1970 um the auto industry went crazy ford and chrysler chief executive lee
iacocca was a prominent opponent of them saying so at least as late as his 1984 autobiography
and lee iacocca and henry ford that's when they worked for henry ford came to see president nixon
pissed and moaned about the air bag and rear fuel tank protection and so on cost too much the the
japanese were taking over the industry this is in 1970 when there were virtually no japanese cars
on the market and so nixon said okay kill the airbag that was the start of what clay
brook calls the long and tortuous history of the airbag in america for years rules and
legislation went back and forth often with safety advocates and insurance companies on one side
and automakers and free market advocates on the other at one point nixon's secretary of
transportation william coleman suggested instead of a rule mandating bags a public
demonstration of airbag technology and there's this humongous fight and and bill coleman and
he fought them to the nail and wouldn't let them go on vacation over christmas until they agreed i
mean it was really it was a hysterical battle and eventually they agreed they went to go on vacation
cost was a concern but critics also alleged the airbag was being forced on consumers and that it
was an insufficiently tested technology that posed its own risks child deaths drew a lot of attention
from 1990 to 2008 frontal airbags caused more than 290 deaths in low-speed crashes most of them were
in cars made before 1998 most involved passengers who were not wearing seat belts or were improperly
restrained and most victims were children around this time government agencies like the national
transportation safety board said the problem was due largely to parents who were placing children
in front seats instead of car seats in the rear by 2001 child deaths related to airbags were
dropping precipitously and it was attributed to changes in parent behavior safety advocates and
regulators said airbags still saved many more lives than they claimed eventually advocates
such as claybrook prevailed and since 1998 frontal airbags have been required on all passenger cars
and required on all suvs and vans since 1999. since the 2014 model year almost all new passenger
cars come with side airbags one nitsa report said front airbags reduced driver fatalities
in frontal crashes by 29 and fatalities of front seat passengers aged 13 and older by 32 percent
another indicated side airbags that protect the head reduce a car driver's risk of death
in driver's side crashes by 37 percent and an suv driver's risk by 52 percent faulty airbags caused
the biggest recall in automotive history the takata airbag scandal which blew out into the open
in 2015 led to the recall of about 67 million airbags the u.s department of transportation
fined the airbag maker 200 million dollars in 2015 the largest civil penalty in nitsa's history the
u.s department of justice also levied a penalty of 1 billion dollars in 2017 and charged three
executives with wire fraud and conspiracy takata went bankrupt and was later bought by ningbo
joycen and merged with key safety systems the very company founded by airbag pioneer alan breed
airbags do not work the way they are sometimes depicted in films
when you see a tv show and then airbag deploys and it's in inflated like forever and someone's
trying to fight their way out of it that's not how airbags work in reality they're very quick acting
they tend to deploy in 10 to 50 milliseconds of the crash happening in the blink of an eye
they're also then deflated within about a tenth of a second they've done their job
during the phase of the crash where you're most likely to be injured at the moment of a crash
a sensor on a car sends a signal to the airbag's computer system telling it to inflate the airbag
the system ignites some chemicals and they produce a harmless gas that inflates the bag in 1 20th of
a second it needs to be extremely quick it only takes about 50 milliseconds for a driver's body
to collide with the steering wheel there are front airbags side and curtain airbags airbags
that deploy near the rear window to protect passengers from impacts in that direction and
even airbags for the knees it is not uncommon at all for cars to have 9 or 10 airbags in them today
most of them not even required by law airbags usually deploy in moderate to severe crashes
if an airbag does not deploy during a crash it may just be that the crash
was not severe enough to activate the accelerometers that engage the system
some cars come with sensors in the seats that can detect the size of a person sitting in the seat
if the system thinks the seat is holding a child or a person of small stature it might shut off
the airbags even if a car is equipped with these shutoff sensors nitsa still recommends seating a
child under 13 in the rear seat some automakers have found that further improvements can be made
to airbags honda co-developed an airbag with top airbag maker auto leave that provides extra
protection to passengers especially passengers in crashes where a car is struck at an angle
current airbags are great in head-on collisions but honda said its research found that a lot of
passengers still suffer brain injuries in crashes even with airbags when a car is hit at an angle
the reason for this is the force from the impact at an angle say even slightly on the side of the
car can cause an occupant's head to rotate often violently this can cause brain tissue damage the
automaker found that actually a slight majority 56 of these crashes occur at some kind of an angle
it's called diffuse axonal injury where the axons in the brain tissue actually
you know shear and separate causing anything from like coma speech loss all of these uh types of
traumatic injuries from uh diffuse axonal injury how diffuse axonal injury actually occurs is the
tissue of your brain wanting to rotate or move relative to your skull it's a very very fast
phenomenon that occurs and again this was studied heavily through the biomechanics community they've
turned that into an engineering equation where we look at head rotational velocities and we can kind
of predict these brain injury metrics conventional airbags tend to have one chamber that fills with
air the new honda design has three with a piece of mesh cloth that holds them in place when the
airbag deploys the mesh sail panel as it is called provides a first layer of cushioning for the
passenger's face and also draws the outer wings of the airbag inward toward the passenger's head the
effect is like that of a baseball mitt the three chambers essentially enfold the occupant's head
shielding it from dangers from multiple directions the airbag was even nicknamed the catcher's mitt
the catcher's mitt is designed to kind of first gently engage you with that airbag with
that sail panel and then the outboard chambers kind of help cradle the sides of your head and
kind of keep you engaged to that center chamber to help manage the overall crash energy and that's
really what's unique about this design is it's got three chambers versus one that really control the
occupants rotation of the head honda jointly holds the patent with autoleave and the patent
is available for other automakers to use right now the two honda vehicles that use this design
are the acura mdx suv and the acura tlx sedan a separate honda team in japan worked on a design to
also tackle the problem of head rotations and brain injuries and crashes and came up with
designs that are now included on both the driver and passenger sides of honda's civic vehicles
honda has a target of zero crash-related deaths in its cars by 2050. korean automaker hyundai
unveiled an airbag concept called the hyundai hug the bag is deployed from the passenger seat and
is made of air-filled chambers and tethers that draw the bag around the body of the passenger
the idea is to hug the passenger in place and protect them from a collision in any direction
the design is specifically intended for cars with seating arrangements that may
be different from the common forward-facing seats the automaker has positioned the hyundai
hug as a bag specifically suited to the age of autonomous vehicles
while vehicle-related deaths have plummeted in large part due to the adoption of passive
safety technologies such as airbags automakers are now setting their sights on a world with
zero fatalities and serious injuries
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