In November 2018, ZF presented the world’s first external airbag and since then the company has further perfected the technology to bring it closer to production.
We now get to see it in action for the first time as ZF gave a live demonstration of the prototype for the pre-crash external side airbag system in Memmingen, Germany. According to the company, side-impact collisions are among the most dangerous type of road traffic accidents. In Germany alone, they account for nearly 700 deaths per year, nearly a third of all occupant fatalities.
Also read: World’s First Multi-Collision Airbag System Revealed By Hyundai
The auto parts supplier believes its new pre-crash safety system prototype it developed can help save lives and reduce occupant injury severity by up to 40 percent. That’s because the external airbag is said to reduce the penetration of the intruding vehicle by up to 30 percent.
The prototype uses an external side airbag deployed milliseconds before a collision to provide an additional lateral crumple zone. In order to make it work, ZF has networked the airbags to the vehicle’s sensor systems and “developed algorithms that are capable of determining if a crash is imminent and decide whether or not to deploy the airbag.”
Unsurprisingly, the biggest challenge ZF faced when developing this system was how to reliably recognize an unavoidable collision and deploy the external side airbag before the collision takes place. The system only has approximately 150 milliseconds to make the decision to deploy the airbag and fill it — that’s the time it takes a person to blink.
Another challenge is the fact that the airbag has a capacity of between 280 and 400 liters, five to eight times the volume of a driver airbag. That means it takes more time to fill it.
Using connected cameras, radar and lidar, the system is able to identify a potential impact, with algorithms within the software deciding whether or not a collision is unavoidable and the deployment of the airbag is both possible and beneficial. If all these decisions are affirmative, the system ignites the inflators to fill the airbag which expands upwards from the side sill to form an additional crumple zone in the door area between the A and C pillars.
In the video, ZF’s external airbag seems to work fine but the demonstration would have probably been more telling if the company used an actual car instead of a seemingly frail rig to t-bone its external airbag-equipped car.