Automakers Seek Numbers in Safety

Tochigi, Japan —  The big Acura sedan slammed into the tiny Honda at 35 mph. In a blink, the smaller car’s front end compressed to about half its normal size. Glass shattered and air bags deployed in both vehicles with loud pops.

A dozen white-coated engineers wearing safety goggles raced from the shadows to the middle of the crash test center’s floor to examine what was left of the Honda Life, a mini-car designed for Japan’s tight streets and with barely half the weight of the 3,970-pound Acura.

It was a point of pride for Tomiji Sugimoto, Honda Motor Co.’s head of safety engineering, that the test dummies in the car emerged battered but without having sustained enough damage to have killed a human passenger.

One reason the little Honda did well was its newly developed frame. Mercedes-Benz is generally credited with developing the so-called crush zones, found in most of today’s autos, that crumple to absorb energy to protect occupants. But Honda’s re-engineered front end does a better job of absorbing and directing energy when a small car collides with a bigger vehicle. And Honda wants to introduce this technology, along with other new safety features, in the family sedan.

In today’s ultra-competitive auto market, safety is a marketing tool.

“Manufacturers are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition, and safety is one way to do it,” said Dan Gorrell, vice president of San Diego market research firm Strategic Vision.

Indeed, safety rarely appeared on auto buyers’ radar screens in the 1960s and ‘70s, but researchers say it is becoming increasingly important these days.

“People have gradually begun paying attention and getting interested in safety ... and the automakers saw that and decided that they had to compete,” said Adrian Lund, chief operating officer of the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

For decades, many consumers have considered DaimlerChrysler’s Mercedes-Benz and Volvo, today a unit of Ford Motor Co., to be the leaders in automotive safety.

In the mid-’90s, Honda’s safety campaign sped up when Chairman Yoshihide Munekuni challenged Honda to become “a company society wants to exist” in the 21st century.

The point man in Honda’s quest to make the safest vehicles on the road is Sugimoto, who joined the safety team in 1978 and was named head of the program in 2001. Sugimoto, 49, now runs a team of about 300 engineers in Japan and the United States.

“Volvo and Mercedes-Benz were the leaders before, and in Japan we were ... a follower, not a leader,” Sugimoto said. “Our goal is to become the top” in automotive safety.

Taking the checkered flag in the safety race won’t be easy for Japan’s No. 2 auto company. Volvo and Mercedes aren’t about to sit back and watch an interloper take away the safety crowns they have worn for so long.

Mercedes-Benz spokesman Geno Effler scoffed at Honda’s determination to lever itself into the safety leadership slot. Mercedes, he said, has “more safety firsts and more sophisticated safety systems” than any other automaker, “and we’re not about to slow down.”

The spokesman for Volvo’s safety division, Christer Gustafsson, laughed when told of Sugimoto’s desire to see Honda take over as the industry safety leader.

“I don’t want to evaluate Honda’s chances to take away our No. 1 position,” he said. “But I will say that it would be better if all auto companies focused on safety. We encourage anything that makes cars safer for people.”

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Crash Course

To build a car or truck that better withstands the forces unleashed in a crash, engineers must first know how every piece of metal is bent and how every piece of plastic and glass is shattered. So Sugimoto stages about 600 collisions a year. His staff spends hundreds of hours viewing and reviewing crash films and data collected by sensors in the vehicles and on the test dummies that ride in them.

In recent years, Honda’s safety record has improved significantly. In the latest tests by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Honda’s vehicles earned more top crash ratings than those of any other automaker.

Honda has said that by 2006 every vehicle sold in the United States under its Honda and Acura brands will come equipped with a standard suite of safety gear, including items such as side air bags and anti-lock brakes that at present are often expensive options.

“The rate at which improvements in safety are coming is very encouraging,” said David Champion, director of automotive testing at Consumer Reports magazine and a former engineer at Honda rival Nissan Motor Co. Collapsing brake and clutch pedals, side air bags, rollover sensors that keep air bags inflated longer, skid-control systems and anti-lock brakes are all features developed by automakers but not yet required by the federal government.

Honda’s bid to pull sophisticated safety improvements down into the everyday passenger car segment is a bold move, said George Peterson, president of AutoPacific Inc., a Tustin-based research and consulting firm. If the company can build cars that rival those of the luxury brands in safety, without raising prices substantially, “it could raise the safety bar for the rest of the industry,” he said.

As part of its effort, Honda in the last three years has spent about $100 million to build two new crash test centers, including one in Raymond, Ohio.

The company’s main center, built for $65 million, is in Tochigi, an industrial town north of Tokyo. The cavernous building has eight tracks, where engineers can simulate head-on and side-impact crashes and other scenarios. A domed roof covers an area of 140,000 square feet without a single support pillar so it can provide uninterrupted views of crash tests. The accidents, some at 50 mph, are filmed by as many as 36 high-speed digital cameras.

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Pedestrian Safety

One arena in which Honda wants to be a leader is the relatively new field of pedestrian safety. To help gather more accurate data, the company in 1998 designed a sophisticated pedestrian crash dummy and built two for $1.5 million each.

The dummies, considered the most advanced in the world, have knee and leg features that closely resemble those of humans, down to cartilage and tendons. Wired with sensors, the dummies give engineers a good idea of what happens to the human head, neck, chest, abdomen, pelvis, spine and lower legs when a vehicle strikes.

In one test at its Tochigi center, Honda suspended a dummy in the middle of the floor. A Civic hit the target at 25 mph. The dummy’s head smacked into the hood, and then the dummy bounced onto the ground, limbs akimbo, as the car screeched to a halt with a dented hood and crumpled grille. Discolorations on the dummy’s cheek and chin pinpointed where it smacked the Civic’s sheet metal.

Honda uses such data to add more “pedestrian-friendly” elements to its vehicles. Cars have been redesigned with extra space between the hood and engine compartment to provide more cushioning to protect a pedestrian from severe head injuries. And windshield wiper pivots, often the cause of pedestrian head wounds, have been redesigned to break away when struck hard.

“We want to make sure that people in our cars, and people in other cars or walking on the street, can escape from an accident with minimum harm,” Sugimoto said.

Pedestrian safety isn’t a big issue yet with U.S. regulators, although about 4,000 pedestrians a year are killed in auto accidents, about 10% of the country’s auto fatalities. But Europe and Japan are starting to require automakers to add pedestrian safety features, and Honda is incorporating its new designs on most vehicles it sells in the United States.

Honda and its Japanese rivals Nissan and Toyota Motor Corp. also are developing “lane-keeping” systems. Their test vehicles employ tiny cameras and lightning-fast computers on board to establish a car’s position in a given lane and sound a warning when the vehicle is about to stray across the painted lines. Honda’s system even momentarily adjusts the steering wheel if needed to keep the car in the proper lane.

But don’t expect to see these lane-keeping systems here anytime soon. They depend on a system of uniform lane markings -- something the tidy Japanese have managed but that doesn’t exist in the sprawling United States.

Almost a quarter-century ago, when Sugimoto went to work for Honda, the company’s safety reputation was spotty. When U.S. regulators began crash-testing cars in 1979, the Civic didn’t do well protecting occupants from fatal head injuries.

So Sugimoto and his colleagues began crashing Civics and reviewing the films.

“It wasn’t highly sophisticated,” he recalled, “just a lot of trial and error. But we understood finally from the films what was happening, and then we designed countermeasures.”

Seat belts were redesigned to absorb more energy and hold seat occupants more securely. Frames were engineered to better absorb the crash energy. And the Civic’s steering wheel and steering column were altered to move out of the way of the driver’s head and chest.

By the early 1980s, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rated the Civic in the middle of the pack in front-end crash tests. After a redesign in 1996, the car won four of five possible stars in the agency’s front crash ratings, and since 2001 the model has won a five-star rating.

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Room for Improvement

Still, Honda has a way to go. The basic Civic coupe, without optional side air bags, scored only three stars in the latest NHTSA test for driver protection in side collisions.

But generally Honda has scored well in various safety reviews. In the latest test by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety of 10 mid-size cars, the Honda Accord EX earned the best results in a 40-mph frontal crash test, while General Motors Corp.’s Pontiac Grand Am ranked at the bottom.

Crash photos show that although the Accord’s engine compartment was badly crumpled -- by design -- to absorb much of the damage, the doors remained relatively intact and there was minimal damage inside the driver’s cabin. The insurance group rated the Accord as “good,” the top grade, in all seven categories. By contrast, the Pontiac’s passenger area was rated “marginal,” and the car’s overall safety rating was “poor.”

One safety area in which Honda faces plenty of competition is the field of sophisticated electronic crash-prevention systems. Some luxury models already on the U.S. market, offered by Mercedes-Benz, Ford’s Jaguar, Nissan’s Infiniti and Toyota’s Lexus, offer cruise control that maintains a buffer zone with the car ahead. Mercedes-Benz and Lexus also offer rear-end crash mitigation systems on their top-end models that help slow the car if on-board radar determines that it is closing too fast on the vehicle ahead.

Honda offers a rival system on one model sold in Japan. Sugimoto will say only that Honda is studying the idea of introducing it in the United States, but analysts expect the company to offer the system fairly soon.

Clarence Ditlow, president of the Center for Automotive Safety in Washington, says the renewed efforts by Honda and some other automakers is a welcome sign that they aren’t waiting for government regulation to force them to make safer vehicles.

But “it’s not the leaders you need to worry about,” he said, “it’s the laggards.”