ON the face of it cars and their drivers usually present a great enough threat to bikes without having extra explosives bolted to them, but a new technology from one of the world's leading car safety companies means doing just that.
Autoliv is one of the pioneers when it comes to airbags, seatbelts and virtually all other types of car safety, and its latest innovation is a new design of windscreen pillar that's just a third of the thickness of a conventional one, improving the driver's angle of vision by 25 percent.
Thick window pillars are the unwanted side effect of ever-stricter car safety laws, as making cars safer on the off-chance they might roll over means restricting the driver's vision at all times. Bad news for bikes, which are easily hidden behind thick pillars. When a driver says “Sorry mate, I didn't see you” the chances are he's telling the truth.
Autoliv's new idea could solve the problem. Its thin pillars are inspired by airbags – they're made of metal that's cleverly folded into an air-tight tube, with an airbag-style explosive charge attached. On sensing the car's rolling over, the charge goes off, and the gas pressure it generates actually inflates the steel windscreen pillar in a fraction of a second, making it thicker and 45 percent stiffer than in its normal, folded state. So you get thin pillars most of the time, improving vision, and thick ones only when you actually need them.
The firm reckons the same idea could be used elsewhere, too, for instance allowing parts of cars to be relatively 'soft' when they hit a pedestrian (or motorcyclist) but making them inflate and become more rigid when the car hits something harder.
Sounds like a good idea to us.
