General Motors LLC and the Takata Corporation have worked together to bring to production an industry first technology, called the Front Center Airbag, which is being implemented on General Motors’ 2013 Midsize Crossover Vehicles.

The Front Center Airbag is an airbag that mounts to the inboard side of the driver front seat. It has a tubular cushion structure and it deploys between the front seating positions in far side impacts, near side impacts and rollovers, with the cushion positioning itself adjacent the driver occupant's head and torso.

This new airbag technology, which is in a different location on the vehicle than other airbags and deploys in a different manner, needed a set of demonstration tests for assessing inflation induced injury potential. This paper discusses the test setup conditions and presents the test results.

Occupants in surrounding seating positions were considered when developing the test approaches. Several of these were based on the Recommended Procedures For Evaluating Occupant Injury Risk From Deploying Side Airbags, prepared by the Side Airbag Out-of-Position Injury Technical Working Group in July 2003 for outboard mounted seat airbags [1]. Additional evaluation modes were developed through a General Motors peer review process involving internal experts. Three driver arm interaction conditions were tested, along with a driver torso in close proximity to the airbag configuration. A passenger head on console condition and infants in rear facing child seats installed in the middle seating position of the second row were also evaluated.

An example test of each approach is presented, with graphics of the test event at different points in time, and with the anthropomorphic test device’s maximum recorded injury values included.

The results presented for inflation induced injury testing of the Front Center Airbag indicate that this technology can meet inflation induced injury goals for the range of conditions evaluated.

This paper also includes a brief summary of the Front Center Airbag hardware design and in-position performance. A sister paper containing field data, a detailed hardware description, and a detailed inposition performance summary for far side impacts has been published at the 2013 SAE World Congress. [2]