Airbag

An airbag is a vehicle safety device. It is an occupant restraint consisting of a flexible envelope designed to inflate rapidly in an automobile collision, to prevent vehicle occupants from striking hard interior objects such as steering wheels.Because no action by the vehicle occupant is required to activate or use the airbag, it is considered a passive safety device. This is in contrast to seat belts, which are considered active safety devices because the vehicle occupant must act to enable them. Terminological confusion can arise from the fact that passive safety devices and systems—those requiring no input or action by the vehicle occupant—can themselves operate in an active manner; an airbag is one such device. Vehicle safety professionals are generally careful in their use of language to avoid this sort of confusion, though advertising principles sometimes prevent such syntactic caution in the consumer marketing of safety features. Various manufacturers have over time used different terms for airbags. General Motors' first bags, in the 1970s, were marketed as the Air Cushion Restraint System. Common terms in North America include Supplemental Restraint System (SRS) and Supplemental Inflatable Restraint (SIR); these terms reflect the airbag system's nominal role as a supplement to active restraints, i.e., seat belts. An American inventor, Dr. Allen S. Breed, invented and developed a key component for automotive use: the ball-in-tube inertial sensor for crash detection. Breed Corporation then marketed this innovation first in 1967 to Chrysler. A similar "Auto-Ceptor" crash-restraint, developed by Eaton, Yale & Towne Inc. for Ford was soon offered as an automatic safety system in the USA, while the Italian Eaton-Livia company offered a variant with localized air cushions. The auto industry and research and regulatory communities have moved away from the initial view of the airbag as a seat belt replacement, and the bags are now nominally designated as Supplemental Restraint Systems (SRS). In 1980, Mercedes-Benz introduced the airbag in Germany that it had patented in 1971, as an option on its high-end S-Class (W126). In the Mercedes system, the sensors would tighten the seat belts, and then deploy the airbag on impact. The airbag was thus no longer marketed as a means of avoiding seat belts, but as a way to obtain an extra margin of occupant safety. In 1987, the Porsche 944 turbo became the first car in the world to have driver and passenger airbags as standard equipment. The Porsche 944 and 944S had this as an available option. This year also saw the first airbag in a Japanese car, the Acura Legend. Audi was relatively late to offer airbag systems on a broader scale; until the 1994 model year, for example, the 80/90, by far Audi's 'bread-and-butter' model, as well as the 100/200, did not have airbags in their standard versions. Instead, the German automaker until then relied solely on its proprietary procon-ten restraint system.Airbags became common in the 1980s, with Chrysler and Ford introducing them in the mid-1980s; the former made them standard equipment across its entire line in 1990.In Europe, airbags were almost entirely absent from family cars until the early 1990s, except for Saab, who made them standard on the 900 Turbo in 1989 and on all models in 1990. The first European Ford to feature an airbag was the facelifted Escort MK5b in 1992; within a year, the entire Ford range had at least one airbag as standard. By the mid 1990s, European market leaders such as Vauxhall/Opel, Rover, Peugeot, Renault and Fiat had included airbags as at least optional equipment across their model ranges. By the end of the decade, it was very rare to find a mass market car without an airbag, and some late 1990s products, such as the Volkswagen Golf Mk4 also featured side airbags. The Peugeot 306 was a classical example of how commonplace airbags became on mass market cars during the 1990s. On its launch in early 1993 most of the range did not even have driver airbags as an option. By 1999 however, side airbags were available on several variants. Turvatyyny bolsa de aire coussin gonflable de sécurité L'airbag Krockkudde bolsa de ar almofada de ar Poduszka powietrzna During the 2000s side airbags were commonplace on even budget cars, such as the smaller-engined versions of the Ford Fiesta and Peugeot 206, and curtain airbags were also becoming regular features on mass market cars. The Toyota Avensis, launched in 1998, was the first mass market car to be sold in Europe with a total of nine airbags.