An airbag is a vehicle safety device. It is an occupant restraint consisting of a flexible envelope designed to inflate rapidly in an automobile collision, to prevent vehicle occupants from striking interior objects such as the steering wheel or window.
Terminology
Because no action by the vehicle occupant is required to activate or use the airbag, it is considered a passive safety device. This is in contrast to seat belts, which are considered active safety devices because the vehicle occupant must act to enable them. Terminological confusion can arise from the fact that passive safety devices and systems — those requiring no input or action by the vehicle occupant — can themselves operate in an active manner; an airbag is one such device. Vehicle safety professionals are generally careful in their use of language to avoid this sort of confusion, though advertising principles sometimes prevent such syntactic caution in the consumer marketing of safety features.
Various manufacturers have over time used different terms for airbags. General Motors' first bags, in the 1970s, were marketed as the Air Cushion Restraint System . Common terms in North America include Supplemental Restraint System (SRS) and Supplemental Inflatable Restraint (SIR) ; these terms reflect the airbag system's nominal role as a supplement to active restraints, i.e., seat belts.
History
Invention
An American inventor, John W. Hetrick, a retired industrial engineer, designed the original safety cushion for automotive use in 1952 at his kitchen table. His patent lasted only 17 years - long before mainstream automotive usage.
Popular Science May, 1968</ref> while the Italian Eaton-Livia company offered a variant with localized air cushions.
Allen K. Breed is an inventor, entrepreneur, and pioneer in one of the most significant advances in automotive safety of recent times, the air bag.
After earning a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University in the years following World War II, Breed first worked in product design for RCA. After rising to a managerial post there, and directing a joint venture with Gruen Watch Company, he founded his first company, Waltham Engineering, in 1957.
In 1961, Breed founded another company, Breed Corp., in order to develop safety and arming devices under contract to the US military. Like Jacob Rabinow, Breed later applied to a broader realm the expertise in fuzes and timing and sensor technology that he gained from military work. Specifically, Breed envisioned a beneficent application for sensor-triggers and controlled explosions, in the realm of automobile safety.
Breed invented his first sensor and safety system in 1968: this was the world's first electromechanical automotive air bag system of its kind. Even then, the air bag was not, in theory, entirely new to the automotive industry; but it took some time to gain broad acceptance. Breed was still well ahead of the game when, in 1987, he founded Breed Automotive (now Breed Technologies, Inc.) to refine and market his safety systems.
The principles on which air bags operate are fairly well known. The keys to their success are reliable crash sensors (which detect an impact either violent or in combination with drastic deceleration), instantaneous triggering and deployment of the cushion, and the prevention of "secondary injuries"---i.e., injuries from the passenger's contact with the air bag.
Air bags have not proved completely successful in meeting this last challenge; but already in 1991, Breed co-patented an air bag that vents air as it inflates, reducing the risk of secondary injuries by reducing the inflated bag's rigidity. This (#5,071,161) is just one of over two dozen auto safety inventions that Breed has co-patented over the years. Today, Breed continues to oversee the improvement of auto safety mechanics and design, including the successful introduction of side-impact air bags.
Meanwhile, Breed's company has expanded its scope to include seat belt, steering and other automotive safety technology. Once located in Lakeland, Florida, Breed Technologies is now known as Key Safety Systems, Inc. with headquarters in Detroit, Mich. It does research, manufacturing and consulting work worldwide, and its products are now used in over 400 models of cars.
Breed himself has earned a number of honors for his work. In 1998, he was included in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 500; in 1996, he was inducted into the Tampa Bay Business Hall of Fame; in 1995, he was elected National Entrepreneur of the Year. And besides being admirable for his business success, Allen Breed, like William Bolander, who won the inaugural Lemelson-MIT Prize for his inventions in automotive safety, has applied his innovative instincts to a truly good cause.
Breed Corporation marketed this innovation first in 1967 to Chrysler. A similar "Auto-Ceptor" crash-restraint, developed by Eaton, Yale & Towne Inc. for Ford was soon offered as an automatic safety system in the USA,</ref>
As an alternative to seatbelts
Airbags for passenger cars were introduced in the United States in the mid-1970s, when seat belt usage rates in the country were quite low. Airbags were marketed as a convenient alternative to seat belts, while offering similar levels of protection to unbelted occupants in a head-on collision.
Ford built an experimental fleet of cars with airbags in 1971, followed by General Motors in 1973 on Chevrolet vehicles. The early fleet of experimental GM vehicles equipped with airbags experienced seven fatalities, one of which was later suspected to have been caused by the airbag.
In 1974, GM made the ACRS or "Air Cushion Restraint System" available as a regular production option (RPO code AR3) in some full-size Buick, Cadillac and Oldsmobile models. The GM cars from the 1970s equipped with ACRS have a driver side airbag, a driver side knee restraint (which consists of a padded lower dashboard) and a passenger side airbag. The passenger side airbag, protects both front passengers and unlike most newer ones, it integrates a knee cushion, a torso cushion and it also has dual stage deployment which varies depending on the force of the impact. The cars equipped with ACRS have lap belts for all seating positions but they do not have shoulder belts. These were already mandatory equipment in the United Stated on closed cars without airbags for the driver and outer front passenger seating positions.
The automotive industry's first passenger side knee airbag (not separate) was already used on the 1970s General Motors cars, it was integrated in the passenger airbag that had a knee cushion and a torso cushion.
The development of airbags coincided with an international interest in automobile safety legislation. Some safety experts advocated a performance-based occupant protection standard rather than a standard mandating a particular technical solution, which could rapidly become outdated and might not be a cost-effective approach. As countries successively mandated seat belt restraints, there was less emphasis placed on other designs for several decades.
Manufacturers emphasise that an airbag is not, and can not be an alternative to seatbelts. They emphasise that they are only supplemental to a seatbelt. Hence the commonly used term "Supplemental Restraint System" or SRS. It is vitally important that drivers and passengers are aware of this. In the majority of cases of death caused by air bags, seat belts were not worn.
As a supplemental restraint
Frontal airbag
The auto industry and research and regulatory communities have moved away from their initial view of the airbag as a seat belt replacement, and the bags are now nominally designated as Supplemental Restraint System (SRS) or Supplemental Inflatable Restraints .
In 1980, Mercedes-Benz introduced the airbag in Germany. as an option on its high-end S-Class (W126). In the Mercedes system, the sensors would tighten the seat belts, and then deploy the airbag on impact. This integrated the seat belts and airbag into a restraint system, rather than the airbag being considered an alternative to the seat belt.
In 1987, the Porsche 944 turbo became the first car in the world to have driver and passenger airbags as standard equipment. The Porsche 944 and 944S had this as an available option. The same year also saw the first airbag in a Japanese car, the Honda Legend.
Airbags became common in the 1980s, with Chrysler and Ford introducing them in the mid-1980s; it was Chrysler that made them standard equipment across its entire line in 1990 (except for trucks until 1995).
Audi was relatively late to offer airbag systems on a broader scale; until the 1994 model year, for example, the 80/90, by far Audi's 'bread-and-butter' model, as well as the 100/200, did not have airbags in their standard versions. Instead, the German automaker until then relied solely on its proprietary procon-ten restraint system.
In Europe, airbags were
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