This Revolutionary Active Hood Could Help End Fatal Pedestrian Accidents

Accidents like that happen with alarming frequency, usually due to a disregard for road rules. According to the National Highway Safety Administration, there were 5,376 pedestrian deaths in the year 2015 alone. The NHSA also reports that, 'On average, a pedestrian was killed every two hours and injured every seven minutes in traffic crashes'.

Enter General Motors and Buick. The Detroit automotive mainstay is unveiling a category first to combat pedestrian injuries when people are struck by vehicles. How? Active hood technology. It's a new feature in the car company's 2018 Regal Sportback vehicle that's been 10 years in the making from Buick engineers.

Buick's revolutionary new feature functions by using special pressure sensors in the front bumper that can differentiate between human bodies and other objects, like trees or poles. When the sensors are triggered, pyrotechnic actuators lift the hood in about 4 inches in a matter of 40 milliseconds. The active hood acts like a baseball catcher's mitt, cushioning the impact of the collision as the pedestrian falls towards and onto the vehicle.

Wahaj Hussain, Lead Active Hood Systems Engineer, led the development and integration of the new technology and believes that this new feature could be monumental in tackling fatal car collisions. "We thought it was important for Buick to consider the sense of well-being for everyone," Hussain tells Men's Health. In addition to active hood technology, Buick's 2018 Regal Sportback also comes equipped with camera and radar-pedestrian detection, front pedestrian braking and forward collision alert.

While we have until this fall to see the technology on U.S. roads, active hood systems have already made a major impact on the number of traffic fatalities in Europe where it's currently employed by Opel Insignias (which share the Regal's German manufacturing plant), Hussain explains. "If you consider the European market alone, we have seen in the last ten years the number of fatalities have dropped down by 50 percent," Hussain says. "We anticipate the same thing will happen in U.S."