Honda's New Passenger Airbag Design


"Oblique" crash tests, where the front of a vehicle is impacted at an angle, have shed light on a problem: in driver's side oblique tests, in many vehicles, the passenger's head slips off the airbag and impacts the dash, causing dangerous twisting forces to the neck and brain as well as potential hard impact injuries from the dash.

You can see that in the top video, where a stationary 2012 Honda CR-V is impacted at 56 mph at a 15 degree angle at a 35% front overlap on the driver's side. The driver airbag contains the driver dummy's head and chest, and injury measures are low. The passenger's head slips off the airbag and impacts the center of the dash, causing fairly high head injury measures. The same pattern was seen in many vehicles that NHTSA tested, and the root problem was often a passenger airbag that was too narrow. The airbag designs worked fine in full frontal or offset frontal crashes, where the front end hit something straight on. The angle causes the passenger's head to move outboard of the airbag's zone of protection.

Driver airbags often come much closer to drivers than passenger airbags do to passengers seated with the seat the same distance back, and as such are often much better at containing forward movement; in addition, they are made with keeping the head from hitting the steering wheel in mind, making it much more difficult for the head to hit the dash.

Passenger airbags inflate with more force, by nature; they're larger. And, passengers can be of a much wider range of sizes and positions than drivers; passengers can include children, whereas drivers generally don't, and passengers are more often "out of position". Many 1990's airbag designs were infamous for seriously injuring and even killing children and other small passengers. Occupant sensors and better designs have largely eliminated this problem in newer cars.

What's really needed is a wider airbag that covers more of the dash. Honda has improved on this idea with their new passenger airbag design. See the video for more information.

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