One out of every eight auto-accident fatalities—roughly 5,000 deaths every year in this country—is a pedestrian. After years of focusing almost exclusively on protecting those inside the car or truck, automakers are finally starting to think outside the box, and the Swedish auto-safety firm Autoliv is helping to lead the way.
In most head-on accidents, the pedestrian's head smashes onto the windshield or against engine parts, through the hood. "If you don't do anything, you have a 50 percent chance of life-threatening injury," says Yngve HŒland, Autoliv's research director. To improve the odds, the company devised a system that senses a pedestrian impact and inflates a pair of steel bellows that props the hood up by four inches in just 70 milliseconds. The person's head then tends to strike the resilient sheet metal of the hood, which can absorb much of the energy of the impact. Autoliv has also tested ...
