Innovations in auto safety design, a key to quality improvement

As the public becomes increasingly aware that safety is a health-related issue, more stringent requirements have now been placed on manufacturers' products so as to limit injuries to people from these products. Therefore, a product's quality is now no longer measured solely in terms of aesthetic, comfort, and durability, but increasingly, in terms of its injury mitigating features. In the Auto Industry for example, safety has become the major factor driving the design of new vehicles. Innovative safety concepts are continuously sought after and evolved by safety engineers to forestall crash (crash avoidance design concepts), reduce injury when crash does occur (vehicle crashworthiness), and to protect occupants and pedestrians from flames and other hazards after crash (postcrash protection design concepts). The objective of this paper is to provide a perspective of the evolution of automotive safety in the United States and also take a peek at global future trends. In addition, this paper shows how innovative safety concepts are not only shaping vehicle design but also changing the rigid definition of vehicle quality. Practical examples of evolutions of innovative safety concepts through the processes of Inventive Engineering are presented in the area of vehicle crash engineering. Concepts constraints are briefly reviewed as related to their design contradictions to comfort quality and safety quality. The focus is on Head Injury Criterion (HIC) and Dynamic Side Impact (DSI) regulatory requirements. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc.