Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards; Occupant Crash Protection; Anthropomorphic Test Dummy

This rule makes permanent three interim final rules related to the depowering of air bags. In March 1997, NHTSA amended the agency's occupant crash protection standard to ensure that vehicle manufacturers could quickly depower all air bags so that they inflate less aggressively. More specifically, the agency adopted an unbelted sled test protocol as a temporary alternative to the standard's full scale unbelted barrier crash test. NHTSA took this action to provide an immediate, but interim, solution to the problem of the fatalities and injuries that air bags were causing in relatively low speed crashes to small, but growing numbers of children, and occasionally to adult occupants. The agency subsequently issued three interim final rules related to depowering. Two of the interim final rules made further amendments to the occupant protection standard so that certain exclusions or special, less stringent test requirements in related standards that applied to vehicles certified to the unbelted barrier test would also apply to vehicles certified to the alternative sled test. The third interim final rule made modifications in the test dummy used in the occupant protection standard so that it would be consistent with respect to the instrumentation specified in the sled test protocol for measuring neck injury criteria.