20.05.2014 Views

PSA COUV page . page RA GB - PEUGEOT Presse

PSA COUV page . page RA GB - PEUGEOT Presse

PSA COUV page . page RA GB - PEUGEOT Presse

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

Corporate Citizenship<br />

AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY FACTS & FIGURES<br />

• Two road test centers: Belchamp and La Ferté-Vidame.<br />

• 18 million kilometers of road tests in 2002 (409 times around the world).<br />

• A patented multi-grip track for braking tests.<br />

• A roadhandling track for ESP/ASR.<br />

• A passive safety center with a full-size catapult, reverse catapult, pedestrian impact<br />

bench, etc.<br />

• 600 complete crash tests and 500 physical tests on automotive subsystems in 2002.<br />

• 3,000 digital crash simulations a year (entire vehicles and subsystems).<br />

• 175,000 hours of simulation on a Cray supercomputer (complete crash simulations).<br />

• Aggregate computation capacity of 1,013 gigaflops, up from 160 gigaflops at end-1999<br />

(1 gigaflop = 1 billion operations per second).<br />

• 60 crash test dummies (unit value: €150,000).<br />

Improving safety accounts for 10% of the Automobile Division’s R&D budget<br />

• Active restraint systems, a major<br />

technological breakthrough<br />

A study of 1,250 serious accidents found<br />

that the use of active restraint systems,<br />

such as seatbelts and airbags, resulted in<br />

an 80% reduction in head and chest injuries.<br />

Fastening the seatbelt, even for short trips,<br />

delivers effective protection.<br />

Seatbelt reminder system<br />

A light warns drivers that seatbelts have<br />

not been fastened and stays on until all<br />

seatbelts are buckled. Just wearing a seatbelt<br />

would reduce the number of fatalities in<br />

French car wrecks by 25%, saving 1,250 lives<br />

a year.<br />

Improving seatbelt-airbag calibration,<br />

based on the full range of passenger<br />

compartment parameters<br />

All <strong>PSA</strong> Peugeot Citroën vehicles are<br />

equipped with three-point seatbelts,<br />

pretensioners and load limiting retractors.<br />

Before the airbag deploys in a collision<br />

sequence, the passenger is pulled tight<br />

to the seat by a traction force of 80 to<br />

100 kilograms, compatible with rib cage<br />

strength, even in the elderly. This action<br />

restricts the passenger’s movement by a<br />

few precious centimeters in the event of an<br />

impact.<br />

Airbags “dampen” violent contact between<br />

occupants and passenger compartment<br />

components. Airbag deployment significantly<br />

reduces the deceleration that such contact<br />

might inflict on the brain, possibly causing<br />

serious, even fatal, injury.<br />

The vast majority of the crash tests conducted<br />

during model development are dedicated<br />

to determining passenger compartment<br />

parameters and to the crucial process of<br />

calibrating the seatbelt/airbag system to<br />

make it effective in a wide variety of accident<br />

configurations.<br />

Active headrests and footrests<br />

These innovative devices have been<br />

introduced as standard equipment on the<br />

Peugeot 307. The active headrest is designed<br />

to prevent whiplash. The active footrest<br />

moves back at the same time as the<br />

bulkhead crosspiece (the part separating<br />

the engine compartment from the<br />

passenger compartment) to prevent often<br />

84<br />

<strong>PSA</strong> <strong>PEUGEOT</strong> CITROËN - MANAGING BOARD REPORT

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!