19th December 2019

Great Automotive Safety Inventions

Great Automotive Safety Inventions

As advancements in automotive safety features continue to make today’s cars safer than ever before, let’s take a look at a few of the great automotive safety inventions which have already saved millions of lives.

Seat belt

60 years ago, Volvo introduced the three-point seat belt we are familiar with today and without any doubt, this is the invention that has saved most lives in the history of the automobile.

Former aviation engineer Nils Bohlin joined Volvo as the company’s first safety expert in the late 1950’s having worked with 3-point harnesses in jet fighters.

Attitudes to road safety were vastly different back then, with many drivers believing they were adequately protected simply by sitting inside a vehicle.

Accidents and fatalities among vehicle occupants was on the rise as the car population and ownership continued to grow and it was only a matter of time before Nils and his team began to apply his aviation experience to vehicles in order to find a suitable safety solution.

In 1959 Volvo introduced the three point seatbelt we are all familiar with today.

Using a seat belt can mean the difference between life and death. Reports show that the chances of surviving a serious road accident are doubled if the driver and passengers take the time to buckle up.

Bohlin’s invention has been credited with saving more than one million lives and is widely considered among the most cost-effective public health interventions. It has also prevented or reduced the severity of injuries among many millions of other road users and it remains the most widely used safety innovation in automotive history.

It wasn’t until 25 years after Bohlin’s original invention that a law was passed in the UK making their use by front seat passengers and drivers compulsory and not until 1991 for all passengers.

 

Like seatbelts, airbags are a type of automobile safety restraint system designed to mitigate injury in the event of an accident. These gas-inflated cushions, built into the steering wheel, dashboard, door, roof, and/or seat of your car, use a crash sensor to trigger a rapid expansion of nitrogen gas contained inside a cushion that pops out on impact to put a protective barrier between passengers and hard surfaces.

As with many good inventions, the idea of the airbag began with a good story. One Sunday afternoon in 1952, a retired American industrial engineer named John W. Hetrick was out driving his 1948 Chrysler Windsor in the Pennsylvania countryside with his wife and seven-year-old daughter. About three miles outside Newport, they were watching out for a deer bounding across the road. Suddenly and unexpectedly, a large boulder appeared, causing Hetrick to hit the brakes so hard that the car veered into a ditch. As he did, both he and his wife instinctively threw their arms in the air to shield their daughter from hitting the dashboard. After they had calmed down and found out no one was hurt, Hetrick could not stop thinking about the accident.

When they returned home, Hetrick started thinking about a way to shield passengers from a sudden stopping of a car. He started sketching designs for his “safety cushion assembly for automotive vehicles” and patented it in 1952.

Even though the first airbags were developed in the early 1950s and widely developed in the USA, in Europe airbags were almost entirely absent until the 1980s. The 1980 Mercedes-Benz S-class (W126) was the first car to be sold in Europe with airbags as an option, with the Porsche 944 and Honda Legend offering them as standard by 1987. By the end of the 1990s almost all cars featured an airbag, as an option at the very least.

In 2009, Ford introduced the first airbag inflatable seat belts in the Fusion and the Volvo V40 launched in 2011 brought the first airbag for pedestrians. In the event of a collision, the vehicle raises its hood and deploys an air curtain to reduce the force of the impact.

This is the invention that has saved the most lives after the seat belt. And it was developed by accident, literally. In 1989, a Mercedes-Benz engineer, Frank Werner Mohn, lost control of his E-Class (W124) in Sweden, while going to the manufacturer’s test track. As he waited for help, he wondered if it would be possible to use the ABS brake sensors to monitor the speed of each wheel and to make the brakes selectively activate to avoid accidents like the one he had just survived.

Electronic Stability Control was one of the first, and most effective, safety systems aimed at preventing accidents happening in the first place rather than, like airbags or seatbelts, reducing the severity of injuries.

It’s so effective it’s been fitted as standard on all new cars since 2014.

Antilock braking systems have been around for a long time and help you maintain maximum braking effort and full steering control in an emergency, without skidding. ESC builds on the capability of antilock brakes.

In 1992, Mercedes-Benz began developing an electronic stability control in cooperation with Bosch for its production models. The system debuted in the Mercedes CL 600.

A lot of accidents are the result of a loss of control in a bend taken too fast or a need to take rapid evasive action. Most drivers find it difficult to recover from a slide or spin.

With ESC, wheel sensors can detect the beginning of a slide and small amounts of braking can be applied automatically to individual wheels to regain stability.

The risk of an accident is considerably lower for cars fitted with Electronic Stability Control.

ESC still relies on the car’s basic braking system and tyres so isn’t a substitute for careful driving!  It won’t be able to prevent all accidents, particularly if you’re driving much too fast or conditions are extreme.

  • ESC can reduce crashes involving a vehicle skidding or overturning by up to 59%.
  • ESC offers additional benefits in adverse road conditions such as wet or snowy weather.

Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) is one of the biggest safety breakthroughs yet – giving vehicles the capacity to slow themselves down when faced with a potential accident.

AEB is becoming increasingly common on new cars and leading safety experts rate AEB as important as seat belts.

What is AEB?

It’s a safety technology that monitors the road ahead and will automatically brake the car if the driver fails to respond to a collision threat.

Think of it like an extra pair of eyes on the road and an extra foot over the brake pedal, ready to act if you’re distracted. In this way, rather than protect the driver using the seat belt and airbag in a crash, AEB can avoid the crash completely.

A significant benefit of the latest AEB systems is their ability to protect vulnerable road users. That’s been made possible by a change in the type of sensors used. Today’s most advanced AEB suites typically employ radar and a camera.

The first urban automatic emergency braking assistant appeared in Volvo vehicles nearly a decade ago. At the time, it used an infrared laser camera, capable of forcing the vehicle to brake on its own at speeds below 18 mph (30 kph), to avoid (or reduce the impact of) a collision.

Since then, these systems have continued to evolve.

Research studies undertaken have shown that AEB led to a 38% reduction in real-world rear-end crashes and Thatcham – a research centre that specialises in vehicle safety – has stated that AEB is “probably the most significant development in car safety since the seatbelt and could save an astonishing 1,100 lives and 122,860 casualties in the UK over the next 10 years.”

What other safety developments are on the horizon?

As well as continually advanced braking systems, many other aspects of car safety are becoming more autonomous.

As well as AEB, it is expected that driver monitoring, automatic emergency steering, Vehicle to Vehicle Data Exchange and Vehicle to Infrastructure will all be fitted as standard in new cars by 2024.