External Airbags Could Soon Be Here To Soften The Blow For Pedestrians

From autonomous emergency braking to simple dashboard warnings, manufacturers have put a lot of effort into preventing accidents involving pedestrians over the last few years. But since it’s impossible to avoid every potential contact, it seems some firms want to look at measures to reduce injuries should the worst happen.

A few years ago Volvo was looking at the idea of an external airbag, and now it seems Mercedes is doing the same. In a patent first filed to the US Patent Office in 2015 and published this month, the company is proposing a system which would have airbags installed in the A-pillars.

They’d work together with a bonnet deployment system, and be discretely hidden under panels until the crucial moment. Each airbag would inflate “across a region of a windscreen pillar and a region of the windscreen adjacent to this,” considerably softening the impact for the unfortunate pedestrian.

External airbags could go further than protecting pedestrians, too. Last year we learned that ZF TRW was working on a side-mounted external airbag intended to reduce the impact forces of side-on crashes by anything up to 30 per cent.