An air bag may offer additional protection for vehicle occupants when used as a supplemental restraint system in cornbination with a seat belt system. Despite this important function, there is no way of demonstrating air bag readiness short of actually deploying it because it can be actuated only once. Theretbre the air bag should be inherently highly reliable.

To help obtain high system reliability, an analysis was performed to evaluate the risk of the failure modes in each component and subsystem, and appropriate provisions were made for those possibilities. Then a set of high-reliability design concepts was established by looking at the common elements of all the improvements.

This paper describes the high-reliability design concept and some considerations in designing the air bag system. Then it discusses the features of an improved air bag based on these design efforts.