Pedestrian safety isn't necessarily the first topic that comes to mind after a week spent the fast new Jaguar XKR coupe. But the XK, when it debuted for 2007, become the poster child for pedestrian protection, thanks to its innovative Pedestrian Deployable Bonnet System. Spurred by a battery of European Union laws written to curb the ever-growing number of pedestrians who die each year in crosswalk collisions with cars, the Deployable Bonnet raises the XK's forty-pound aluminum hood in the blink of an eye, putting crush space between it and the unyielding engine below. As pictured at left, the moment an unfortunate walker is clipped, a sensor strip mounted within the bumper sets off a pair of airbag-esque pyrotechnic charges at the base of the windshield to inflate a pair of flexible pillars, lifting the hood two-and-a-half inches and providing a cushion of sorts for the falling body. Clever, and likely effective, if a bit elaborate and expensive for mass-market applications. The sultry new Citroën C6 sedan has a similar system. In both cases, the Rube Goldbergian pop-up hood was intended to circumvent comply with EU legislation calling for three full inches of clearance between the underside of the hood and engine/suspension components — a rule that may prove a significant threat to the low-slung look for which cars like the XK were famous. But the fun's not over yet.
Rant continues after the break.
Photos courtesy of Jaguar.
Japanese lawmakers and automakers have jumped on the pedestrian-safety bandwagon (to wit: Honda's soft-and-squishy Puyo concept from this year's Tokyo Show), and it won't be long before Washington gets the itch, too (U.S.-spec Jaguar XK models don't have the Deployable Bonnet system). And tougher E.U. legislation is expected by 2010, with committees and car companies haggling over such key points as the minimum soft-deformable space at bumper-level, optimum materials for body panels, headlight and side-mirror placement, and even pedestrian-safe front-suspension designs. The bottom line is that car design is about to change forever, and almost certainly (from an aesthetic standpoint, at least) not for the better. Expensive gimmicks innovations like the deployable hood (and features like external air bags, a silly notion with which some automakers have toyed) seem to be little more than stopgap measures, as legislators, like the governing body of NASCAR, force automotive designers to function around a laundry list of homogenizing mandates (headlights must be X. high, leading edge of hood must be X. high, etc.).
So is it alarmist thinking to imagine that the beautiful automobile is bound for extinction? How long before what's left of the art of car design suffocates beneath reams of legislation? Politicians are always meddling where they're not wanted, passing needless laws to protect their constituents from each other. (Recall, if you will, about twenty-five years ago when it was widely believed the U.S. government was poised to outlaw that rolling deathtrap called the convertible.)
The European Union's legislation, when fully implemented, is expected to save some two thousand lives a year — hardly an insignificant number, particularly if one of them happens to be me or someone I love. But we wonder how many of those two thousand could be spared the short, sharp shock of death-by-bumper if they'd only do what our moms and dads tried to teach us: Look both ways before you cross the street.
Read more about the Jaguar Pedestrian Deployable Bonnet System.
The Citroën C6
