Quantitative Life Cycle Description of Air Bag Restraint System (ABRS) Equipped Vehicles

This paper quantitatively describes the life cycle of ABRS-equipped vehicles using stochastic modeling. The vehicle migration model integrates production forecasts, probabilities of survivorship and probabilities of such events as collision, ABRS deployment and fires to provide estimates of:

• - Annual vehicle production and the total population of vehicles “in use”
• - Number and percent of vehicles produced with ABRS and the percent of vehicles “in use” equipped with ABRS
• - Number of vehicles that are voluntarily and involuntarily retired to each of four end states: abandonment, active parts salvaging, passive parts salvaging, and metal reclamation
• - Number of ABRS deployments
• - Number of ABRS replacements