TRW’s Safer Safety System

Although people often talk about a “holistic” approach to things, more often, said things are individual items that just may—if you squint—be considered to be “a system,” possibly holistic.

But here’s something that is showing some significant integration: TRW has combined its Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) system with its Active Control Retractor (ACR) seat belt system. The former provides maximum braking pressure without driver intervention in the event that an imminent collision is detected via mid-range radar and a scalable video camera. The latter pretensions the seatbelts based on sensor input, which not only puts the individual in better relation to the airbags, but also provides additional driver warning (that pretensioning is something you can’t help but notice—trust me).

And what does this do? Improve safety.

Explains Alois Seewald, TRW’s global director for integrated active and passive safety technologies: “By integrating the two systems we are able to realize a higher level of safety: the ACR can provide an additional warning to the driver when a critical situation is detected and pretension the seatbelt a splint second sooner than sooner than an ACR system working only based on vehicle dynamics sensors information. Although were’ talking about milliseconds, it can help mitigate the impact of a crash.”

The combined system is to be ready for production in 2013.