TRW Unveils New Active Control Retractor Seatbelt System

Safety has always been TRW Automotive’s number one commitment, and now the company has further enlarged its product portfolio with the addition of a new system that aims to reinforce driver warning, improve occupant position in relation to the vehicle's airbag restraint system, and provide automatic braking support.

This has been achieved by combining TRW's Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) system with its Active Control Retractor (ACR) seatbelt technology.

The system will be ready for production in 2013. TRW's ACR system has been in production since 2002 and is currently available on a number of vehicles including Mercedes, Hyundai, Jaguar and Audi vehicles.

"The combination of TRW's ACR and AEB systems helps ensure that the seat belt is pretensioned well in advance of a potential collision, helping to maintain occupant position and assisting in the effectiveness of other restraints and safety measures," said Alois Seewald, global director for integrated active and passive safety technologies at TRW.

Working in isolation, the two systems use data from environmental and vehicle dynamics sensors to offer automatic emergency braking support without driver intervention, or remove seatbelt slack to help maintain the position of the driver or passenger in anticipation of airbag deployment.

"By integrating the two systems we are able to realize a higher level of safety:  the ACR can provide an additional warning to the driver when a critical situation is detected and pretension the seatbelt a split second sooner than an ACR system working only based on vehicle dynamics sensors information. Although we're talking about milliseconds, it can help to mitigate the impact of a crash," added Seewald.