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Airbags are old friends too.
So last year, Mercedes-Benz also teamed up with fashion designer Heron Preston to create a concept clothing series inspired by air bags. After all, the new S-Class as a background board is the first time to provide front head airbags for rear passengers, and it is clear to tell everyone that the back seat is not because it is not needed.
Although it is already a very mature technology, the development of airbags has not stopped over the years. For example, in 2020, Euro-NCAP in Europe upgraded the side impact safety standard and added Far-Side Impact for multi-occupant situations in the car. So car companies have begun to apply the front row central airbags to alleviate the collision between the two passengers in the front row.
The popularity of air bags in the car has been decades ago, and the number of air bags is increasing and more than ten or twenty, which is today's new trend.
Sticking hard is dangerous!
I've seen this question a long time ago: since the airbags can be used inside the car to mitigate the impact, why can't it be outside the car?
Nuro, a driverless delivery robot startup, is equipped with an external airbag on their just-launched third-generation product, the R3. Designed and manufactured by Nuro and BYD's North American division, the car, with airbags from supplier Autoliv, looks a lot like a small pillow to reduce the potential harm to pedestrians and cyclists.
Nuro R3 has a top speed of 72km/h and a full load weight of at least half a ton, which can already pose a threat to non-motorized vehicles.
A fully autonomous unmanned delivery vehicle equipped with airbags to prevent hitting pedestrians may seem at first glance a bit distrustful of its own self-driving technology. But if you think about it, the protection of pedestrians and non-motorized vehicles is actually a little different from that of motor vehicles: even if the driverless delivery vehicle itself has pre-determined the braking stop in advance, if the non-motorized side cannot avoid collisions, this half-ton guy may also cause personal injury.
Nuro should be the first driverless delivery car to use airbags, but external airbags are nothing new for passenger cars.
Back on April 1, 2013, Volvo had shown a safety system called EnVeloP, consisting of a series of airbags hidden on the roof, which surrounded the entire body and ensured that the car was not harmed by external collisions in all directions – and then there was no more, which was Volvo's April Fool's Day joke of the year.
But this line of thinking is really taken seriously, and ZF has introduced similar external airbags around 2019, the main purpose of which is to resist the damage caused by side collisions to the vehicle. According to ZF's estimates, the external airbag can reduce the side impact by 30%, which of course increases the safety of personnel under severe impact.
However, so far, such external airbags have not been mass-produced. The main reason is not the airbag itself, but the airbag that can cope with the impact of the vehicle needs a large volume, which correspondingly requires a longer inflation time. This requires the vehicle to anticipate the possibility of an impact before the collision occurs, and it must also have a high enough degree of judgment accuracy, otherwise the cost of use is obviously unreasonable.
For side-by-side vehicles, even if intelligent driver assistance systems are popularized today, new models have a 360-degree all-round field of view, and accurate detection of long-distance incoming cars in the positive direction is not what everyone pays attention to. In particular, such accidents are more likely to occur in the blind spot of the side field of vision, and the response speed and accuracy requirements for the side sensor are higher.
The external airbag of "anti-collision" is still some distance from practical application, and the external airbag of "anti-collision person" is already around you and me.
Volvo began in 2012 (the year before the April Fool's Day joke above) introduced the world's first mass-produced pedestrian protection airbag. The airbag is mounted on the rear end of the V40 hood, and its main role is to protect the head of pedestrians in the speed range of 20-50km/h, reducing the fatality of pedestrian impact accidents.
In the absence of pedestrian protection, the head is accelerated towards the hard windshield, the protruding A-pillar, and the windshield and hood contact grooves (the head is more fast when the head is hit), which are the main causes of death in low- and medium-speed pedestrian impact accidents because the pedestrians are first exposed to the bumper after the impact.
Since then, many car companies such as Jaguar Land Rover and Subaru have also begun to use this type of external pedestrian airbag.
Another way of pedestrian protection is the active bouncing hood, which has the principle in common with pedestrian airbags. Although there are no airbags, quickly lifting the rear end of the hood to a certain height when a pedestrian collision is detected can reduce the drop and speed/kinetic energy when the pedestrian's head falls to the hood surface, thereby reducing the injury suffered.
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Active hoods are relatively less expensive (but also valuable) than pedestrian airbags and are easier to widely use. If you look closely at the videos of traffic accidents in recent years, you can sometimes find traces of the work of such safety devices.
Nuro may indicate another kind of development path for external airbags, because driverless logistics vehicles are likely to share road resources with non-motorized vehicles and pedestrians, and the risk of encountering vulnerable people such as the elderly and children is higher. To avoid possible troubles, external airbags may be of greater value to them.
Whether it is a driverless car or a passenger car, whether in the car or under the car, more and more airbag protection is inevitable in the future, but I hope that you will never personally feel what it is like to be bombed by an airbag.