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A frontal barrier crash at 48.5 km/h and a moving rigid barrier crash at 48.5 km/h into the side of a stationary car have been carried out at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's Vehicle Research Center, with the car having frontal then side preinflated airbag bumpers. This is a preliminary simulation of an airbag bumper system with the needed airbag inflation triggered by radar sensing of the approaching threat. The frontal airbag bumper had a high pressure airbag at 221 kPa and 23 cm thick imbedded on the outboard side of a low pressure airbag at 20 kPa whose inboard side was against the original car bumper, with a thickness of an additional 61 cm at the center line, for a combined thickness of this prototype airbag bumper of 84 cm. The low pressure airbag ruptured as expected in the frontal crash, with the airbag bumper absorbing about 19 percent of the energy of the crash due to excessive penetration into frontal structures.

Ejection is a major problem in motor vehicle safety, with some 43,000 people per year being ejected from passenger cars, with some 6000 of these killed. About half of these people killed are ejected through glazing areas. The November, 1983, amendment of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 205 now allows the use of glass-plastic glazing anywhere in a motor vehicle. Our study has explored the “safety net” implications of glass-plastic glazing, produced by Saint-Gobain Vitrage, 3M, and DuPont for the anti-laceration implications but tested in our study for reducing ejections by controlled deformation after the glass layer or layers break. The inner plastic layers holds the broken pieces of a tempered side glazing together enough to reduce adult head partial ejection in side impacts, with the plastic layer trimmed to the glazing edges.