The predecessor of the airbag
12/06/2023
Car developers started thinking about passive safety early on. One of the pioneers was Dr. Emil Enzmann, who built the VW Beetle-based sports car of the same name in Switzerland.
As a country doctor, he was aware of the forces acting on the occupants of a car in the event of an accident. So he installed lap belts early on, but also provided for an impact absorber on the passenger side. Of course, this did not work as well as a modern airbag, but these did not yet exist in 1960. In addition, the impact absorber could also be used as a road map holder and thus also offered the functionality of a primitive navigation system.
Pretty clever, wasn't it?
We published an extensive article about the Enzmann 506 with plastic bodywork a long time ago. The red Enzmannwas portrayed for a report in the current SwissClassics Revue, together with the last of the Enzmann brothers who worked on the cars at the time ...
