Volvo created a “pedestrian air bag” years ago that inflated on the hood of the car when it detected what could be a pedestrian being struck.
They replaced that with systems that auto-brake at low speeds when they detect pedestrians or bicycles. Other manufacturers have this kind of tech too, but there are zero standards and no enforcement AFAICT.
I wonder how effective that would be - given that a pedestrian hitting the hood could be coming from a ton of different vectors compared to the collision of a driver with a steering wheel, I wonder if you'd just end up throwing more energy and chaos into the collision.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/how-pedestrian-airbags-wo...
But note, they have moved on to trying to avoid striking pedestrians and/or reduce injury through reducing speed.
Seems like that's a better choice - moving to prevention rather than mitigation.
studies by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) also blamed SUVs for the higher death rate, concluding that "pedestrians are two to three times more likely to suffer a fatality when struck by an SUV or pickup than … by a passenger car."
https://www.aarp.org/auto/driver-safety/info-2018/suv-pedest...
I’d like to see the study, the first question I have is whether they accounted for the proportion of SUVs on the roads increasing relative to cars.
It’s common for second- or third-hand accounts to gloss over details like that.