What on earth was the Procon-ten system?

Today’s cars are stuffed with airbags, but go back more than 30 years and one car-maker had an alternative solution, recalls

Even the briefest look at a modern car brochure demonstrates that today’s buyers benefit from a vast range of safety systems, most of them managed by bafflingly complex electronics. But apart from the sheer number fitted to many models, the good old airbag barely merits a mention. Since their debut on the Mercedes-benz W126 S-class way back in 1981, they have become an expected part of the modern-day safety arsenal. However, just three years after Mercedes’ big unveiling of the life-saving technology, another manufacturer was taking a slightly different path when it came to protecting vehicle occupants.

Audi has never been shy about advertising its ‘vorsprung durch technik’ credentials, but if you bought one of its cars back in the late 1980s or early 1990s you might have noticed a small sticker in the window proclaiming it was fitted with Procon-ten. What on earth was it?

Well, Programmed Contraction Tension, to give it its proper name, was introduced in 1984 and was a safety system fitted to the 80, 90, 100, 200 and V8 model ranges. Audi was already spending lots of time and money making its cars safer and, having studied the results of crashes, engineers established that most injuries suffered by drivers in frontal impacts were caused by the steering wheel. It seems obvious now, but this sort of investigation was cutting-edge back in the 1970s and would lead to development of Procon-ten.

It was Elmar Vollmer, an engineer at Audi who had been involved in the company’s safety research since 1971, who’s widely credited with overseeing the introduction of Procon-ten, as well as subsequent work on airbags and improvements in the structural design of Audi bodyshells.