Cars
Testing airbags that are better for bikers--even if the crashes still look rough on the dummies.
By Miriam Kramer Posted 01.22.2013 at 9:00 am 5 Comments

Cushion The Blow
Cushion The Blow EPA/Piroschka van de Wouw

In the United States, only 1 percent of trips are made by bicycle. In the Netherlands, which has only 1/18 of the U.S.’s population, that number is close to 26 percent. With so many bikes on the road, Dutch company TNO is working on a car airbag that deploys outside the vehicle to reduce bicyclist injuries. Upon impact, the airbag, housed under the hood, inflates to cover parts of the windshield and cushion a biker. In tests last November, engineers drove a track-guided car into a dummy on a bike at 25 mph, the average speed of a crash. Accelerometers in the dummy’s head and neck and pressure sensors embedded in its limbs indicated brain damage and broken bones. Dummies in collisions with the airbag had fewer and less severe injuries up to 45 percent of the time.

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5 Comments

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Greenmatrix
01/22/13 at 11:28 am

Good news for cyclists. Any video`s of this?

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vt007
01/22/13 at 12:13 pm

seems like my normal day on a bicycle...

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(Type 0.72) = We are still just cleaver monkeys!

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Robot
01/22/13 at 2:28 pm

Sad sigh, this is what old robots do, once they are out of a job being a robot, hence becomes a crash dummy. Waaaaa!

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gizmowiz
01/22/13 at 2:59 pm

Actually air bags that cover the entire exterior of the car do more than saves lives like pedestrians and bicylists--they can be the cure for a Hail storm headache!

I successfully made a bumper to bumper 'air bag' from distressed swimming pool air rafts by sewing them together and then inflating them with a blower similar to those used by bounce houses, etc. It works great.

They only thing is they can be dangerous when throwing baseballs at them as they throw the balls back just as fast as you throw one at them and ouch that hurt a few times!!

Serious.

They store away in tube bumpers that run along the side of the cars like running rails on trucks or under the front and rear bumpers. But they take a bit of time to deploy and far more time to roll back up--I didn't have the knowledge to make a venetian blind type rollup systems which would snap back after the air is let out. Oh well I'll let someone else patent it!

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pressinfoTNO
01/24/13 at 2:08 am

Videos of the TNO-airbag for cyclists can be found here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnZD1uMN3Y0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nv5R8WvLxE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMticiCj8oU