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A rearward-facing infant restraint (RFIR) planned for use in the front seat of a vehicle equipped with a passenger-side airbag has been prototyped and subjected to crash tests under FMVSS 213 test conditions-- including a deploying passenger airbag and a CRABI 6-months old dummy. This RFIR design is discussed in detail, including energy management assumptions, design objectives, and the preliminary development testing. The RFIR prototype's design development test data are compared to a set of evaluation criteria. The results indicate the potential value of this rearward-facing infant restraint for controlling the motion, forces, and accelerations an infant could be exposed to during airbag/infant restraint interaction.

We would like to discuss a set of unique concepts in active-occupant-restraint (airbag) systems which are unlike presently used airbags. Like present airbags, the concepts we will discuss are only designed to be deployed when vehicle sensors determine that the magnitude of a crash will imminently surpass a preset threshold. In other words, we are dealing with a state of a crash from which an occupant without an airbag is not likely to “walk-away”, a state of a crash after which a vehicle is not likely to be worth-while repairing, the type of a crash that we will refer to in this paper as a “catastrophic” crash, a “grievous” crash, to borrow from the dictionary. These concepts not only protect the front torso of an occupant, but also the back of the neck, and the sides of an individual body by actually enveloping her or him with a protective cushion.