irishcar.com - Ford Fiesta Safety

It’s hard to differentiate any part of a car as being a ‘safety’ element, because, as one engineer said to me last week, ALL parts of a car design impinge somehow on safety.

But there is a figure out there which suggests that at least 30% of a modern car’s components are directly related to safety. Which is an awful lot more than was the case even a decade ago.

We’ve been familiar with seatbelts since the early 60s, when they made their first appearance in Ireland (for me they were on a new Ford my Dad bought, and he had to pay extra for them), and yet only about 30% of drivers on Irish roads use their seatbelts all the time. The belt systems used today, though, are extraordinarily more sophisticated, as well as being mandatorily available for all occupants.

We’ve also become familiar with airbags, because they have both proliferated and become more sophisticated, and have helped save many lives. I’ve been a witness to how two colleagues were saved from probable serious injury and quite possibly the loss of their lives because the side ‘curtain’ airbags in their Peugeot 307 deployed properly in a rollover.

And we know vaguely about ‘door beams’ and ‘crumple zones’ which are supposed to keep us from impacting directly with colliding vehicles or street furniture.

I suppose the most recent car at which I’ve looked closely for these systems is probably the most up-to-date, and while it won’t arrive in Ireland until June or July, the new Ford Fiesta is a state-of-the-art example of how car occupants stand a much better chance of walking away from very serious accidents than their parents did.

Ford takes the view, like other manufacturers, that safety systems are a combination of elements. In the new Fiesta we see the latest iteration what the company calls its Intelligent Protection System as developed for the current Mondeo.

Dual-stage air bags, standard on all Fiestas, feature new smart safety technology that can better sense the severity of a frontal impact. The objective of the system is to tailor the air bag response to provide the front seat occupants with the correct level of air bag protection based on the type and severity of the collision.

They are only part, though, of an occupant package of six available air bags for the new Fiesta. We have to remember that these extra elements will be options in most markets, or available only in higher-spec versions.

Thorax-protecting side airbags are available for the front seat occupants in the event of a side impact.

Optional inflatable side curtains provide side-impact head protection of the front and rear seat passengers. The curtains inflate to cover the full length between the vehicle’s A- and C-pillars.

A ‘next-generation’ adaptive airbag system with dual stage deployment capability for both front air bags is tailored to provide appropriate protection according to the type and severity of the crash. A crash severity sensor at the front of the vehicle is capable in milliseconds of sensing the type of accident and the impact severity. The airbags deploy in timed stages, according to a predetermined protocol based on potential accident situations.

The front seat safety belts feature pyrotechnic pretensioners to remove slack from the safety belt for optimal safety and air-bag effectiveness. The front safety belts also feature load-limiting retractors designed to prevent chest injuries by limiting the forces applied by the safety belt during the impact.

Special emphasis has been placed on reducing driver lower leg injuries through footwell intrusion in a frontal crash. Fiesta has a new deploying brake pedal assembly designed to minimise such injuries. Opel has equivalent systems in their Corsa and Astra and in the forthcoming new Vectra.

Fiesta’s steering column can collapse up to 75mm to absorb energy from the driver’s movement, to reduce the chest injury potential. It is also designed to contain rearward energy from the base of the steering column, which has space to sleeve into the upper portion of the steering column via offset U-joints.

New Fiesta’s body is 100 per cent stiffer in bending and 40 per cent stiffer torsionally than the previous model of the same name, making extensive use of high-strength steels to create a robust body structure for occupant protection.

The rigid body structure has been engineered to provide multiple load paths for the management of crash energy. In addition to the lower path along the floor, typically the only energy path in many small cars, Fiesta’s body structure is designed to distribute crash energy into an upper path via the cowl and into the A-pillar through the doors and side beams.

Using some of the motor industry’s most powerful computer tools, Ford’s safety engineers developed a body structure optimised for strength and crashworthiness, minimising the transferral of impact forces to the passenger compartment. They incorporated a large proportion of high strength steel and variable gauge laser welding for the occupant cell, and surrounded it with energy-absorbing crush zones to minimize the forces exerted upon the occupants.

Frontal crash performance has been further optimised by relocating Fiesta’s steering rack lower and strengthening the mounts for sacrificial ‘crash cans’ of the bumper structure.

New Fiesta also provides robust side impact protection, with a strong, cold-rolled steel beam to protect occupants from side impacts.

The new Ford Fiesta has been designed with the objective of achieving a strong, 4-star rating in the respected Euro NCAP safety testing. It is currently being tested.

The car’s body structure also has been optimised for fuel system protection, an area in which Ford sets targets above and beyond statutory requirements and industry standards and is designed not to leak even in a direct collision.

The car also has energy-absorbing foam bolsters in key areas, including at the hip point inside the door (above). Special care has been taken to remove hard points in the lower dash area, should these areas be impacted by front passenger’s knees in more severe crash events. And by creating a diagonal extra support in the door frame (below) where normally the shape would be square and flat, there's an extra protection against a door intruding in a side impact.

There’s an awful lot of technology there. There are also a lot of explosive devices managed by a complex computerised electronics system. The ironic thing is that nobody ever wants to really find out if they work. For many, though, such systems have already made them very grateful indeed for the ongoing work of motor safety engineers.

And in this piece we’ve not even looked as such stuff as ABS and the other electronic driving aids. We’ll save them for a later piece.

But the best safety element of all is a driver who goes carefully, safely, and is aware of everything that is happening around his or her car as they travel.

And don’t forget the oldest slogan in motoring safety: Clunk Click!