Inflatable seatbelt

Seatbelt is one of the earliest inventions of car safety features. Since then, a lot of safety features such as airbags and Electronic Stability Programme (ESP) has been developed to provide further protection and prevention against accident. However, seatbelt is considered as the prime safety feature, where we’ll suffer injury even if we have a dozen of airbags in the car but doesn’t buckle up our seatbelt. This is because seatbelt is designed to secure us in the seat and prevent us from hitting any part of the car’s cabin. 

There are two kinds of seatbelt – 2-point seatbelt and 3-point seatbelt. A 2-point seatbelt only consist of a lap belt while a 3-point seatbelt (Figure 1) consist of a lap and shoulder belt. 

Eventhough seatbelt is known for saving lives, it is still not perfect. It might produce cuts and bruises at the area of the belt, and even more serious injury like damaging the internal organs. However, thanks to the rapid Research and Development (R&D) of car safety feature, Ford has introduced inflatable seatbelt to overcome this problem.

Compared to a conventional seatbelt, the inflatable seatbelt can help to distribute the crash force energy five times better and some users even claimed that the inflatable seatbelt is more comfortable due to its thicker padding. It helps to reduce the head and neck movement in an event of a side impact too.

 A conventional seatbelt (left) and an inflatable seatbelt (right).

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