Packer Engineering: Engineers with Answers

Gerald D. Driscoll, M.B.A., P.E.

Adjunct Consultant

Gerald Driscoll is a mechanical engineer specializing in vehicle accident reconstruction, occupant restraints and testing. He also addresses mechanical design and failure issues. He has an extensive background in automotive crash testing, vehicle occupant safety systems, automotive safety test devices and military vehicles spanning 39 years.

At TRW Occupant Safety Systems, Mr. Driscoll managed a department providing crash-sled simulation testing as well as static air bag and seat belt testing to internal and external customers. He led efforts to develop a sled-based panic braking system to evaluate air bag performance with occupants displaced forward from pre-impact braking and a sled-based system to evaluate side-impact thorax and head bags.

At Southwest Research Institute, Mr. Driscoll managed crash sled programs to develop and evaluate occupant restraint systems under impact conditions using dummy, animal and cadaver human surrogates. He led a team of professionals over a four-year period to evaluate injury hazards to the out-of-position child from deploying air bags for two leading vehicle manufacturers, who used this information to define injury corridors for the three-year-old child dummy. He designed and evaluated vehicle wheel-chair restraints and co-developed a device to propel dummy parts into vehicle interior surfaces so injury severity from occupant contact could be predicted. Mr. Driscoll also developed and evaluated internal combustion engine components.

Mr. Driscoll co-authored a paper for the Society of Automotive Engineers, "Injury Corridors for a Three-Year-Old Child Dummy Subjected to Out-of-Position Air Bag Deployments." Mr. Driscoll is a licensed professional engineer in the State of Michigan.