Ford, the Inflatable Rear Seat Belt, and the Mechanics of Lifesaving

Ever been to a press conference? It's weird. There's a podium and stage lighting. TV cameras. Boom mics. And there are journalists. Real journalists. Next to you is a guy from the New York Times, on the other side of you is a guy from Fortune. They have digital voice recorders and degrees from Columbia and deadlines. You were the editor of your high school newspaper (for one year, and that was 20 years ago) and your pen - the one the Ford PR people gave you, thank God, because you forgot to bring yours - doesn't work. The only thing you have in common with any of them is that like many of these seasoned pros, you are hungover and cynical. 

I'd flown out to Detroit - Dearborn, to be be precise, home of the Ford Motor Company's World Headquarters -  the night before, the sole male member of a group of bloggers invited to cover this event. Ford would provide transportation, food, and lodging. We'd be privy to a big announcement: Ford would be unveiling a new safety innovation. We'd also get to have breakfast with Ford executives, and get a tour of the Safety Lab. The Safety Lab! Images of cars being smashed and crash test dummies flying through windshields danced in my head. Breaking stuff is cool. Of course I wanted to go.

The new safety innovation is both forehead-slappingly basic and remarkably sophisticated: inflatable rear seat belts. The concept is simple: inside the shoulder belt is an airbag. In a collision, the airbag deploys, literally tearing through the belt casing, giving additional protection by spreading out the force of impact over a great area. The belt airbag is designed to reduce injuries to the head, neck, and chest. The folks at Ford believe that this will have a substantial effect on kids and elderly riders.

Well, they had me at "kids". Curious, I spent some time chatting with Dr. Srini Sundararajan, a Ford safety technical leader and one of the key members of the project's engineering team. The challenge, he said, was making an airbag work like a seat belt - his team had been working on this project for several years (in fact, Ford had first divulged that they were developing these belts in late 2005), and had come up with the idea of using the buckle itself as the inflation mechanism. The gas canister is housed inside the "female" end, and the "male" end is hollow, allowing the gas to pass through and inflate the bag. The design has a additional bonus - the belts themselves are considerably more comfortable than standard shoulder belts. The material feels softer, and the bag itself acts as padding, with rounded edges that don't chafe the neck and shoulder. Lucas gripes about having to wear "the grown-up seat belt" when he's in his booster seat; that's one less thing for the kid to complain about when on a long road trip (dear Ford, please develop a Whining Activated Car DVD Player, thanks, Me). Ford intends to equip the next-generation Explorer, going into production next year, with these belts. More models will be equipped as they roll out.

But what you really want to read about is stuff getting wrecked, right?

One might say that our next stop, the Ford Safety Lab, is where the magic happens. The engineers who put in long hours there might disagree. There's no magic here, only physics. The Safety Lab is where windows are smashed and bumpers implode and SUV's crumple like defenseless empty beer cans at a frat party, all under the watchful eye of a very dedicated group of men and women. We were escorted by senior engineer Mike Hamilton and Steve Kozak, Ford's Chief Engineer for Safety Systems. I was impressed - not so much by their titles, but by their intelligence. Having spent a considerable amount of time working directly with engineers, I'm still in awe of them: these are smart, smart people - to them, advanced calculus is a second language. We got to see all manner of tests. We spent most of our time in the Component Lab, where individual car- and dummy-parts are subject to all sorts of abuse: the sight and sound of a car door getting pasted by a hydraulic battering ram is something I'll not soon forget. Blink, a reflexive jump at the shotgun-blast sound, BLAM! An airbag deploys, and what was a solid piece of galvanized metal is now a shiny pancake. All of this is measured in milliseconds. The engineers study monitors, take notes, watch video footage in impossibly slow motion, hit system reset buttons, and do it again, dozens of times a day, thousands of times a year. (When Steve Kozak, the guy who runs the whole shebang tells you with a big grin that it's fun to smash stuff - yeah, I feel OK saying that it's pretty damn cool.)

We dads skew towards being the Car And Gadget aficionados in the familial structure, and what Ford is doing to make cars safer is something worth reading about (especially since we dads do have a say in the stuff that the familial structure purchases). But here's the thing: while the inflatable seat belt and the Safety were impressive, what really struck me was the dedication of the people involved. Yeah, they work for a big corporation, and are up against deadlines and their competitors in the auto industry. But there's something more, deeper, to what they do. They're working against Death - the Car Crash wants to maim and kill you, the odds are stacked in its favor, and the safety engineers are charged to keep that from happening. To a person, the engineers I met gave off a vibe, a sense of purpose - one hates to use the word aura, but maybe that's the one that fits best - that I've experienced from few others I've met: doctors, nurses, lifeguards, firefighters. I came away from Ford having seen some cool stuff (and when Steve Kozak, the guy who runs the whole shebang tells you with a big grin that it's fun to smash things - yeah, I feel OK saying that it's pretty damn cool) and maybe a tad less cynical than when I arrived. 

(Crash test dummy in seat photo courtesy of my iPhone; photo of crash test dummy wearing activated inflatable seat courtesy of Ford Motor Company.)