Few people realise that the conception of airbags - a soft shock absorber to land against in a smash - has been around for over 60 years. The very first patent on an air bag for air planes was registered during World War II. In the 1980s, the very first commercial airbags were present in cars.

Up to now, statistics reveal that air bags cut the chance of death in a direct head-on crash by as much as 30 percent. Now we also have seat mounted and door mounted side airbags. In fact, some automobiles go way beyond just having two air bags, and alternatively have 6 to 8 air bags.

The job of an air bag is to decelerate the driver’s advanced motion as smoothly as possible in only a split second. There are three parts to an air bag that help execute this feat:

• The airbag itself is made of a thin, nylon fabric, which is compressed inside the dashboard or steering wheel and, nowadays, the seat or door
• The detector is the gadget that instructs the airbag to balloon. Ballooning occurs when there is a smash force equal to motoring into a brick wall at 16 to 24 km per hour. A switch is flicked when there’s a weight movement that closes an electrical contact, instructing the detectors that a smash has occurred. The detectors get information from an accelerometer that’s part of a microprocessor chip
• The bag’s expansion system combines sodium azide (NaN3) with potassium nitrate (KNO3) to make nitrogen gas. Hot gusts of the nitrogen inflate the air bag

Because of the incredibly fast deployment of an airbag, it’s crucial the driver and passenger sit in the seat with a straight back leaving a safe distance between their face and the dashboard / steering wheel - this provides time for the bag to expand while the passenger/driver are being forced forwards by the shock of the accident.