Safety: The simple seatbelt is still a winner

PHOTO COURTESY OF VOLVO

The three-point seatbelt, credited to a Volvo engineer, is responsible for saving thousands of lives every year.

Jim Kenzie

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Automotive engineers as far back as the 1930s were crash-testing cars, looking for ways to make them safer in the event of a collision.

This is called "passive" safety (how to mitigate the consequences of a crash after the fact), as opposed to "active" safety (how to help prevent the crash in the first place).

Here's a brief summary of progress in the passive safety arena.

Seatbelts

Without question, the most important automotive safety feature ever invented is the three-point seatbelt. Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin generally gets the credit for this device, which first appeared almost exactly 50 years ago, and soon spread throughout the automotive world.

Seatbelts have saved thousands upon thousands of lives, and reduced the seriousness of injuries to millions of car crash victims.

Recent advances in belt technology include:

Pre-tensioners – pyrotechnical or mechanical devices that take up the slack in the belt in the early stages of the collision to enhance restraint effectiveness.

Force limiters – counterintuitively perhaps, they play out a little slack at certain stages of the collision to reduce the load on the body.

Improvements in mounting location – adjustable shoulder anchors, for example, or belt-to-seat anchors, which help ensure optimum belt alignment.

Ford, among others, is also working on a four-point belt that offers even better protection, but so far, comfort and convenience concerns have precluded acceptance by consumers.

Airbags

Airbags themselves provide relatively small incremental safety advantages over seatbelts, adding only 5 to 10 per cent additional survivability, according to a study conducted by Leonard Evans, one of the industry's leading safety researchers.

(Side airbags and rollover curtains are a different, and frankly more valuable, story.)

Newer multi-stage bags that "know" from sensors under the seats how heavy the occupant is can deploy with only as much force as is needed. They also can modify their deploying profile depending on the severity of the crash.

Active Head-restraints

Whiplash is the gift that keeps on giving, seldom fatal but seldom fully cured.

If someone came up with a safety feature that could reduce these effects by around 70 per cent for a few dollars per car, wouldn't there be a Nobel Prize in the offing?

Not that you'd notice, because active head-restraints are just that safety feature, and government safety regulators won't even make them mandatory.

Saab is generally credited with the first anti-whiplash head-restraint in 1996, with Volvo following two years later.

The two systems operate slightly differently, but the principle is the same: when the occupant's weight is forced rearward in a rear-end collision, a lever system within the seat drives the head-restraint forward, "catching" the head before it extends backward to create the strain upon the neck vertebrae.

Other carmakers are finally coming to the party. Surprisingly, Korea is currently embarrassing the rest of the industry: Kia and Hyundai have fitted active head-restraints to several of their cars that start well under $20,000.

Come on, rest of industry: how valuable are your customers?

And come on governments: start protecting your citizens.

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