Automotive Safety Council Presents Pathfinder Award to BMW's Klaus Kompass

DETROIT, April 6, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- At the 56^th Annual General Meeting of the Automotive Safety Council, held March 22-26, 2017 in Aventura, Florida, the organization recognized Klaus Kompass of BMW AG with its prestigious Pathfinder Award.

Prof. Kompass was honored by the organization for his decades of contributions, achievements and innovations in vehicle safety engineering and technology.

Prof. Kompass graduated in Safety Engineering at the University of Wuppertal, Germany in 1985. After serving as a scientific assistant in a research project in German coalmines he became crash test engineer at BMW AG in Munich, Germany. In 1999 he left BMW as department manager advanced safety engineering to go to Autoliv GmbH. There he was Head of Engineering Autoliv Central Europe. Coming back to BMW in 2003 he was responsible for Electronic strategy and in 2005 became Head of a project group on Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Since March 2008 he is the Vice President Vehicle Safety for the BMW Group, being in charge of Active Safety (collision avoidance, collision mitigation), Passive Safety (Injury Prevention) as well as Functional Safety. Prof. Kompass - both nationally and internationally - is a well-known and universally recognized expert in vehicle safety, whose work has been recognized with a large number of awards, such as the 2013 U.S. Government Award for Safety Engineering Excellence; the Body Innovation Award at the International Body Engineering Conference and the Fraunhofer ICT Airbag Award in 2004. He holds several patents in vehicle safety innovations and was appointed as lecturer at the Technical University in Berlin where he teaches Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Active Safety.

Past recipients of the Pathfinder Award include Senator John McCain; Mercedes-Benz Director Dr. Rodolfo Schoeneburg; IIHS President Adrian Lund; NCAP innovator Kennerly Digges and many other luminaries in automotive safety.

The Automotive Safety Council, founded in 1961, is a worldwide association of the leading active, autonomous, passive, child and interiors safety industry manufacturers and suppliers. The Council speaks for the industry, representing its interests and presenting its views on any and all national and international levels. The mission of the Automotive Safety Council is to improve the safety of people throughout the world through the development, production and implementation of the latest automotive safety equipment by preventing accidents, protecting occupants and pedestrians when in a collision and to notify emergency responders after the collision when necessary. The mission utilizes voluntary, regulatory and legislative directed use of these life-saving products in order to make it available to the most people in the lowest cost manner to save the most people from injuries and fatalities.

SOURCE Automotive Safety Council