USA's NHTSA says this new Honda airbag design is the best - working like a baseball catcher's mitt

Cars are tested for frontal collision protection in a controlled lab, at speeds of around 64 km/h. In the real-world however, there are many factors that can reduce the effectiveness of an airbag in preventing severe head injuries.

There could be multiple vehicles involved, the impact could be from a different angle, and there could be secondary impacts following the initial one.

At high speeds, the passenger’s torso may sometimes slide across the inflated airbag’s surface and hit a hard surface.

A new three-chamber front-passenger airbag design by Honda seeks to mitigate this.

Honda safety engineer named Eric Heitkamp was recently awarded the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Safety Engineering Excellence Award for his work on developing a ground-breaking airbag technology.

Honda's new front passenger airbag technology is designed to better manage lateral collision forces that can cause an occupant's head to rotate severely at high velocity and slide off a conventional airbag, increasing the chance of serious injury. Heitkamp led development of the new airbag utilizing new research measuring brain injuries in vehicle collisions

Rather than the single inflatable chamber of conventional front passenger airbag systems, the new airbag operates something like a baseball catcher's mitt, with an uninflated panel first catching and decelerating the occupant's head with less force, while also directing it inward between two inflated chambers to cradle and protect the head. Specifically, the new passenger front airbag uses four major components: three inflated compartments consisting of a center chamber and two outward-projecting side chambers that create a wide base across the dash and the uninflated “sail panel" that stretches between the two side chambers.

Heitkamp accepted the U.S. Government Award for Safety Engineering Excellence at the 2023 Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV) conference in Yokohama, Japan. Designed to decrease the chance of serious brain injury.

Since 2021, the new passenger front airbag technology has been installed in the Acura TLX. It has since been introduced in the Acura MDX and Honda Pilot in the US.

If you are wondering about Honda models in other markets - US market cars have different airbags from the rest of the world, even if it's a same model, due to intricasies of US regulations.

While the rest of the country adopts a more sensible Euro-centric UNECE regulations, USA's FMVSS regulations require airbags to work without seatbelts. Believe it or not, the state of New Hampshire does not require seat belts to be worn.