Ford to make inflating seatbelts mainstream

Only two car-makers have developed inflatable seatbelt technology -- Ford and Mercedes-Benz – and now the Blue Oval has beaten Benz to licence the technology to other brands.

At present only a handful of vehicles feature inflatable seatbelts, including the Mercedes-Benz S-Class limousine and Ford Explorer SUV, and the former is the only vehicle available in Australia with the technology.

However, that is likely to change in the coming years as Ford releases the intellectual property behind its latest safety feature.

The idea of inflatable seatbelts is to reduce the impact on the ribcage and torso in the event of a collision, spreading crash forces via the belt over a surface area five times larger than a regular seatbelt once inflated.

Ford says the system also helps "control head and neck motion", thus reducing the severity of whiplash injuries.

Bill Coughlin, President and CEO of Ford Global Technologies, said inflating seatbelts will greatly improve the safety of vehicle occupants.

"The wider adoption of inflatable safety belts has the potential to make travel safer and help mitigate passenger injuries – especially among children and the elderly," he said.

He also trumpeted Ford's "long-standing commitment to democratising technology goes beyond our customers".

The driver's airbag made its production debut in 1981 in the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, but it took seven years – until 1988 -- for the first US car-maker (Chrysler) to offer airbags in its cars.

So it remains to be seen how quickly the rest of the automotive industry adopts inflatable seatbelts.

In related safety news, Ford is pushing ahead with its cloud-based vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technology, via its AppLink system.

On Monday (June 2) at the Computex technology show in Taiwan, the company will use two Kuga crossovers to demonstrate how the V2V system improves vehicle safety.

Holden has offered in-car apps with its vehicles for more than a year, but Ford Australia is still yet to confirm a local launch date for its AppLink system, which was first launched on the Ford Fiesta in North America in 2011 and was due to have been made available to Australian customers in the first quarter of this year.