An active head restraint moves forward and upward in a rear-end collision to decrease the space between the restraint and the occupant’s head, reducing the degree to which the head accelerates before making contact. The less acceleration, the lower the chance of injury.
Using a lever-action mechanism built into a seat, the active restraint redirects the force of an occupant’s body as it presses into the backrest to move the head restraint forward. The beauty of this design is that it reacts proportionately to the occupant’s motion. Unlike the type of pyrotechnic charge used in airbags and seat belt pretensioners — the intensity of which may be too high or low — the active head restraints’ motion is dictated by the occupant’s size and weight and the severity of impact.
Active head restraints first appeared on Saabs and are now available from many automakers on all types of vehicles. The devices typically are applied to a vehicle’s front seats. You can find out if a vehicle has active head restraints by visiting the safety section in its Cars.com vehicle summary.
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Other Safety Advances (Cars.com)
Information for this was taken from Cars.com’s glossary, written by Joe Wiesenfelder.
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We bought a Ford territory TX in 2005. We thought that it was a good car. It wasn't cheap at over $40,000 and the only options we added were 7 seats and fog lights.All that came standard were electric windows, bad air conditioning, no air bags, no alloys, terrible brakes a cd player that doesn't even have the time of the song on it. our Mazda 2 was better and it was 2 years older. If you sat in the third row you would get a terrible head ache because of no air conditioning and the terrible vacume cleaner engine noise.You were sitting on a piece of plastic with fabric over it. The folding arangement was even worse in the mazda cx9 you flick a switch and the seats go down in the territory another 4 steps later and the seats would be down. With the 3rd row seats up we could bearly fit my school bag in the boot not alone my brothers bags, my friends and shopping in their. Also with terrible full economy we were losing money every time we drove it. then a year later it got even worse we took it to a automatic car wash and because of the terrible build quality water was leaking through the boot. Then everything was fulling apart. We were loading it up with sand at flinstones, it was parked on a hill facing the pile of sand with a man filling it up.Then it slid down the hill and nearly crashed into the man filling the car. My dad quickly hopped into it and cheched that the handbrake was on and it was in park gear. We had had enough. We sold the territory and felt sorry to the person who bought it. We then went to mazda and bought a lovely mazda 6 wagon.