Rotary Engine in VW's New Beetle
 

No, the Beetle isnt rotary powered, but appreantly, their seat belts are!!! I caught this on wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine

"Perhaps the most exotic use of the Wankel design is in the seat belt pretensioner system of the Volkswagen New Beetle. In this car, when deceleration sensors sense a potential crash, small explosive cartridges are triggered electrically and the resulting pressurized gas feeds into tiny Wankel engines which rotate to take up the slack in the seat belt systems, anchoring the driver and passengers firmly in the seat before any collision."

I'd love to see how exactly this works, maybe some diagrams from their mech. manual.
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this is interesting. i have never heard of this though. If it were really working, it would be on the VW website as a propaganda. so i don't think this thing exists.

A lot of people put BS they find humorous on Wikipedia, so i take everything with a grain of salt.

I saw this a while ago, an it didn't really make much sense to me, especially the "explosive cartridges" part. So what if you have to slam on your brakes? Do you have to replace the cartridges then? I think it's bogus. I also couldn't find anything else out about it.

you can't just put whatever you want up there...can you? Don't they check anything before making it official?

Wikipedia has never failed me before. :nono:

You know, I've looked up some more stuff, and I believe it's probably for real. I've read things about Volkswagen seatbelts, some stuff about risk of igniting flammable materials during activation of tensioners, and some stuff about other, tiny rotary engines. The explosive part still makes no sense to me, though. But I guess they don't expect you to crash more than once.

No, the VW Beetle's seatbelt does not have little engines that input gas and oxygen, combust it, and put out exhaust - to tighten the seatbelts on a crash.

I believe you can edit whatever you want. I recently changed some info to see what would happen and it allowed me... :Freak_ani

Oh, I changed it back. (but still might not be right... )

I thought seat belt tensioners were basically a little weight that pivots forward under extreme deceleration, blocking a saw-blade looking thing on the seat belt spool from turning. Simple and effective. I'd be extremely surprised if VW or any other car company used some wacky Rube Goldberg-esque setup like the one described above.

The RX-8s all have an explosive one-time-use charge for the front seat-belts to not just pretension, but lock-hard in a crash. Mine had to be replaced for $222 each after I hit the lousy deer with my RX-8.

After the crash it seemed like insult added to injury because I had to drive my car home the last few miles with the airbag in my lap and the seatbelt hanging uselessly at full extension. Both front seatbelts would drag the ground when the doors were opened and would not retract at all.

Seems unlikely that it would be a wankle system, but I can tell you first hand it is a one-time charge.

http://www.tierone.com/seatbeltpretexcerpt.html

The newest pretensioners are pyrotechnic.

Interesting read about pretensioners. I had no idea car's employed anything like this.

http://www.advanceautoparts.com/engl...0040501es.html

Nice link, thanks!

Anyone else experienced these in an RX-8 or another car? My experience was hitting a 200lb deer at 55mph - not as rough as hitting another car or a wall, but it was enough to trigger both front airbags and the pyrotechnic front seatbelt pretensioners.

The effect was incredible. There was a ton of damage to the front of the car, but I was unharmed and not even rattled. The front seatbelt held me perfectly and the airbag just tapped me on the chest (must have been the lesser of the two-stages). The impact point of the airbag was especially interesting - I'm 5'11" and it struck me on the chest, not at all on my face.

No abrasion from the seatbelt across my chest, no bruise from the buckle on my hit, no fat lip from the airbag. If the deer hadn't done $10,000 damage to my car I wouldn't have felt bad at all. ;)

Volkswagen uses small 1.3 liter Wankel engine called the Renesis in their seatbelts.

i always wondered why my Bug got such poor gas mileage and sipped so much oil.

LMAO. Oh, shit that was funny. It still sounds sort of strtange, but maybe they use some little contraption with some rotors in it or something, and are calling it a Wankel.

Mercedes used these back in the 2000 model year. It really is a little wankel engine. It can real up a fair amount of seatbelt if necessary, or just a little, if that's all that's required. The wankel allows it to real in a lot while limiting belt force... due to the low torque of the rotor :mdrmed: Simple pyrotechnics are old news and the newest systems are way more advanced than the wankel type.
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/4420/wankeletr4eq.jpg

What the hell. I guess the engine that powers the RX-8 is being used by other companies to tighten seat belts. Oh man, I hope this doesn't get out. I can just see pulling up to a stop light next to some Civic and some guy looks over and says, "excuse me, could you tighten my seat belt for me?"

Wikipedia got this one right but not the 250 hp.

Well, since you don't own an RX-8, this can't happen to you at least :p: