The safety man: Brian O'Neill and his team at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety wage war on unsafe vehicles and outdated government standards

Automotive Industries, Nov, 2001 by Gerry Kobe

"We already know enough to tell the public that if your first concern is safety -- avoid small vehicles," O'Neill advises. "You don't need the biggest vehicle, but get out of small because they don't offer much safety."

Some of the concerns over IIHS testing lie not in the process but in the interpretation of the results. Robert Lange, executive director of safety integration at General Motors Corp. says that at least with the NCAP test GM has been able to clearly identify the differences between vehicles that rank high and those that rank low.

"We haven't been able to make that assessment yet for Brian's test," Lange says. "They spend a lot of time trying to correlate it to real-world safety; but we are a little concerned with the subjectiveness of that evaluation procedure. It would also be good to have a correlation between that test and injury reduction, but it will be a while before there is enough data."

O'Neill responds that there is a correlation to real world safety and a common sense issue as well.

"You already know you're in trouble when the passenger compartment starts to collapse," O'Neill says. "Then the restraints are no longer operating in the envelope for which they were designed. We use the analogy of shipping china to illustrate a safe design. The first thing you need is a strong box that won't collapse. Then you put in bubble wrap. The box is the safety cage and the bubble wrap is the restraint system. Most vehicles fail because the structure fails -- not the restraints. There's nothing wrong with the bubble wrap."

Supplier Input Boosts Safety

"When you start designing a restraint system, you assume the structure is strong -- that intrusion into a vehicle will be minimized," says Craig White, chief technology officer for Breed Technologies. "Without that, there isn't a lot a restraint supplier can do. But assuming that, the very basic formula is to sense a crash and then develop countermeasures for it."

White says sensing the crash is the tricky part, particularly in designing a sensor that does well in both a barrier and an offset test.

"There's a big difference in sensing time between the two," he says. "If you deploy an airbag too slow, the occupant is already out of position and the airbag can hurt them; too fast and they can bottom out the airbag. We do well in both because we have an excellent algorithm. It actually defines the class of the crash, then determines the severity within that class."

O'Neill gives suppliers high marks for the job airbag systems are doing, but also draws the line on airbag proliferation. Pointing to proposals for thorax airbags, torso airbags and even external airbags, he says enough is enough.

"We have airbags everywhere," he chuckles. "Do we really need all that? No. That's the short answer."

His one exception to that is side airbags, which O'Neill feels are needed to protect the head in side impacts (see sidebar at right).

"Inflatable side curtain bags are coming into their own," says Pat Jarboe, director of corporate communications for Autoliv. "We're on Volvo and Mercedes with those products now, and with rollover regulations coming it will grow. We'll use sensors that know' if the vehicle will roll, even when there are still four wheels on the ground. It'll fire the seat belt pretensioners before the person moves out of position, inflate the bag, and it will stay inflated for five to seven seconds to prevent occupant ejection. Those are things we are researching now."