Abstract: A low cost, high bandwidth "smart skin" impact sensor is developed for application to vehicle side impact detection and diagnostics. The sensor is based on a piezo polymer smart skin technology and can sense impact location and impact energy in real time (i.e., fractions of a millisecond) along a vehicle side panel. The sensor is simple to manufacture, is low cost in production quantities, and can be used in concert with other devices in a sensor suite to provide, reliable, efficient, energy managed airbag development. With proper spatial shading techniques it is shown that the sensor can be designed also to report impact angle and the velocity of the impacting body.