BMW 2008 Annual Report Download - page 208

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Before an automobile can be sold worldwide it has to pass
at least  different crash tests. Then there are additional
tests to make sure it meets the BMW Group’s own high
safety standards. The company has been researching the
causes of accidents and the most effective ways of dealing
with them for more than  years. Developers have en-
dowed the Group’s vehicles with energy-absorbing defor-
mation zones, reinforced passenger compartments, re-
straint systems, airbags and many other “passive safety
systems” which save lives and protect drivers from injury
on a daily basis. The side head airbag alone, which the
BMW Group was the first automobile manufacturer world-
wide to offer as a standard feature back in , has drasti-
cally reduced the number and severity of head injuries in
the event of a side impact. The combined effectiveness
of
these and other safety technologies is reflected in acci-
dent statistics: Although the total number of kilometres
driven on German roads more than tripled between

and , the number of road casualties fell by around
 percent over the same period. Ironically, that has be-
come
something of a problem.
It has now become virtually impossible to make drivers
and their passengers any safer – even with the most so-
phisticated passive safety systems. “Of course we could
add even more airbags to our vehicles or make the body
even more rigid,” says Klaus Kompaß, head of vehicle
safety at the BMW Group, “but these days we have pretty
much exhausted the potential of passive systems.” That
is why for some time now Kompaß and his colleagues
have been focussing their attention more on active safety,
where the primary goal is not to mitigate accidents and
their consequences but to avoid them altogether. This
requires developers to take a much broader view – and to
look beyond the vehicle to the surroundings in which it is
driving.
Off to a spectacular start. The shriek of a siren warns of
an imminent impact. Almost immediately the building is
rocked by an ominous thud, and then – silence. The vehi-
cle’s tail-end has been severely crushed by the impact –
under glaring spotlights, with high-speed cameras cap-
turing
every thousandth of a second of the crash.
Just another day at the largest of the BMW Group’s three
crash test facilities. The elongated cement-encased
building
on the grounds of the Research and Innovation
Centre (FIZ) in Munich is sort of like an ultramodern
scrap-
ping plant – only for research purposes. Every day the
technicians here send brand new automobiles fitted with
dozens of test sensors hurtling into a concrete block. Or
they have them rammed by a high-speed barrier. Or else
they find some other way to deliberately deform them.
And they do it all in the name of maximum and precision
safety.
The challenge of the future Topic three Access to technologies and customers Safety
2007