Here's a video showing Ford's new inflatable seat belts for rear seats.
Ford Motor Company is bringing to market the worlds first automotive inflatable seat belts, combining attributes of traditional seat belts and air bags to provide an added level of crash safety protection for rear seat occupants.Inflatable rear seat beltsThe advanced restraint system is designed to help reduce head, neck and chest injuries for rear seat passengers, often children and older passengers who can be more vulnerable to such injuries.
Ford will introduce inflatable rear seat belts on the next-generation Ford Explorer, which goes into production next year for the North American market. Over time, Ford plans to offer the technology in vehicles globally.
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I'm always happy to see new ideas for how to keep people safe in car accidents and I support this. Still, I'm curious about how much it will cost to replace them after an accident.
"Ford will introduce inflatable rear seat belts on the next-generation Ford Explorer, which goes into production next year"
Really? They still haven't learned and are going to continue to beat the SUV horse to death? "Look at our new innovation! Pay no attention to the fact that we're dragging our feet and installing it on the same old shit!"
Very cool idea. Too bad you have to buy a Ford to get it. Hopefully, someone who makes decent cars will steal it.
they still make the Explorer?
Really? The Explorer? Because the people in the Focus probably need these a little more when they get slammed by a SUV...
Inflatable seatbelts won't keep granny's head from caving in when that POS rolls after you lose control while barreling down the highway at 75 mph in a snow storm.
Bill Ford Jr. can you take a break from your busy beer league hockey career to make some sound business decisions once in a while?
It's survival of the fittest customer. Surviving Explorer owners are a superior demographic for brand loyalty than Focus owners.
The major cause of deaths in car accidents is being thrown from the vehicle. I see this in accident reports time and time again. Getting into a car without using a seatbelt is like playing Russian Roulette. No safety feature can help you if you don't use it.
Let's use this life-saving technology to prop up the sagging, flagging sales of our SUV line!
The one thing people have to take into consideration is that all of these safety systems cause havoc for first responders (firefighters, paramedics, etc). For example, look at this article:
http://www.firefightingincanada.com/content/view/2009/213/
So while I think this is very cool, it's interesting thinking about how it will have to change the strategy rescuers use to get people out after the accidents.
Wouldn't belts with just a bit of elasticity be much simpler, and, hmmmm, er, reliable than this?
I want a ride on that test rig. WOOOOOOO!!! EAT THIS, TOP THRILL DRAGSTER!
Midknyte - in a word, no. The difference is on a couple of levels, but firstly, elasticity is not forever - like the waistband on your underwear, the elasticity will eventually break down, and probably get jamned in the mechanism.
Second, an elastic belt will let you go forward more than the static belt - which gives you more opportunity to bash your head than the plain old belt, not less.
Still not as cool as the Ed Hardy Rear Seatbelt Spikes adornment.
My research focuses on older adult drivers. They have higher injury and death rates than middle-aged drivers. One of the main contributing reasons is increased physical fragility which leads to greater injuries in a crash that would cause far less damage to a younger driver. From what I've read, car companies do not use older adult crash test dummies (they do have child and younger adult ones). I wonder if Ford have used older adult crash test dummies to test these objectively. I noticed that they are rear seat only, and so won't protect older drivers and their generally older front seat passengers. With the growing older adult populations in OECD countries, car companies really need to step up their testing and design. I can't see a generation of baby boomers happy to be less well protected because no one has yet taken these concerns seriously.
Midknyte & Jerril: Belts _are_ designed to deform. They're not reusable after an accident and can stretch quite a bit. However, you don't want much elasticity in seat belts because the whole point is to stop _with_ the car to make use good of its deformation. That's why we've got explosive seatbelt pre-tensioners in so many cars now.
There's a big difference in being firmly attached to a solid structure that's deforming in a controlled way and being loosely attached to it. In the latter situation, the car hits something and starts to slow, but you're still flying through the air until the slack in your belt is removed. The car goes from 50mph to 30 mph over a few inches, and then you have to go from 50 mph to 30 mph in a fraction of an inch. OUCH.
If you want to increase your survival odds in an accident, make sure your seat belts are not just on, but fairly snug.
Also, one of the things this may reduce is abdominal injuries from seatbelts. They likely don't mention it, as they don't want to dissuade people from wearing the old seatbelts. The larger inflated size would distribute the impact over a wider area, hopefully being less damaging. Still of course MUCH safer (on average) to risk an injury from a seatbelt than not wearing a seatbelt.
This has two benefits - one, larger surface area, less likely to do damage due to the belt itself, and two, it fills some of the frontal flail reduction role that front seat airbags fill. You can't do that in the rear seats without something edgy like airbags firing rearwards from the back of the front seats, which as far as I know have always been ruled out as excessively complicated.
The larger surface area issue could be dealt with by inert systems - there's no reason not to use a six inch wide seatbelt from an engineering perspective, but people already consider normal belts too constricting and would object to wearing them. So this dynamic model, with a thin belt which expands out, deals with the human nature problem...
So in your attempt to diss Ford twice, you managed to make no sense.
Be clever or be gone, grumps!
Why not skip this and go straight to the four point harness? While we are at it, you can throw in a hans system...
Not that I'm against innovation, but how about making the cars lighter and better able to take damage (as apposed to just crumpling like a tin can that weights 3000+ lbs.)
It's somewhat couterintuitive, but crumpling is good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone
Cars that stay intact transfer the momentum to passengers.
Lighter would also good, agree on that part. Lighter cars would also damage other cars (and pedestrians) less.
Still waiting to see somebody make a car with 4-pt belts.
4 point harnesses are bad, worse than a 3 point seatbelt. They lead to submarining and possibly spinal compression. You really need to use a 5 or 6 point harness.
As I understand it, the inflatable seat belt is an option that cost a couple hundred bucks -- not a lot to keep your precious cargo safe.
Obviously you haven't heard the latest from Consumer Reports, which reported that Ford's vehicle reliability is now "equal to or better than the best in the industry." Ford's quality is better than ever and they have more top safety ratings than any other vehicle maker.
Even on Boing Boing -- which usually attracts above-average intelligence -- I'm seeing a lot of comments based on out-of-date opinions and flat-out ignorance. So your freakin' Windstar broke down on you in 1996. All the recent evidence indicates that Ford is the thought leader on vehicle safety (popularized both seat belts and air bags and has earned more top safety picks than any other automaker). As for their quality, Consumer Reports recently stated that Ford's reliability is "equal to or better than the best in the industry". This isn't the same company that disappointed you 10-20 years ago. It has new leadership, state-of-the-art technologies and some seriously kick ass cars and trucks. So, you don't want an Explorer? No one's asking you to buy one. But you ought to take another look at this company, because they're giving the imports a serious run for their money.
Wrong you are. 1) You apparently don't live anywhere it snows with any regularity, or know how SUV's behave when you slam on the brakes in the snow. And yes, that is how people drive their SUVs around here. 2) As Ford the motor company was beginning to really tank in early 2007 where was Bill Jr? At an amateur ice hockey tournament in northern Wisconsin. How do I know? I played in a different division at the same tournament. His team won their division. His team's picture appeared in USA Hockey magazine.
In retrospect, my original post may have been too insider information-y. Might not make a lot of sense to someone from outside of the Detroit metro area at first glance.