Toyota Working on First Rear-Seat Center Airbag

Now that side curtain airbags are increasingly becoming standard issue, Toyota went in search of other key points of injury in accidents. One of the few places that airbags couldn’t seem to help was the space between the two passengers in the backseat. During a side collision, the two occupants can collide violently.

This led the automaker to develop the very first rear-seat center airbag, which deploys from a compartment in the roof. Presumably, a sensor will stop it if there’s someone sitting in that middle seat.

Toyota says the new airbag will debut this year in a model set to be launched in Japan, but there’s no word on which model or when we’ll see it in the U.S.