Award-Winning Seat Belt System

TRW Automotive’s active seatbelt system, the Active Control Retractor (ACR), was honored with a Premier Automotive Suppliers' & OEMs’ Contributions to Excellence (PACE) Award in the European Product category on March 8, 2004. The category recognizes innovations that were introduced in Europe first and had a significant impact on the world market. The ACR seatbelt system takes just milliseconds to detect a dangerous situation and take appropriate action – for example, by tightening the driver’s and passenger’s seatbelts. The production code for sophisticated control electronics was generated by TargetLink, dSPACE’s automatic production code generator. Because the system is crucial to safety, the reliabilty and efficiency of the code had to meet particularly tough standards. TargetLink fulfilled the requirements for the project and was instrumental in bringing it up to production level. The ACR seatbelt system is part of the PRE-SAFE system used by Mercedes-Benz. It was introduced in the S-Class in 2003, and is now also in use in the M-Class and the new CLS-Class. The PRE-SAFE system has also received numerous international awards.