eBusiness
 |
I presume we only talk collision safety, a lot of stuff can help you avoid a collision in the first place, and thus increase safety, but I won't discuss that in this post.
Practically any detail affect safety. There are the obvious pieces of safety equipment like seat belt and air bags, but just as important is the overall design of the vehicle to crumble correctly. The key to avoiding injury is to make the acceleration of the passengers smooth, imagine driving head on into a concrete wall in a tank at high speed, the body of the tank might be relatively unharmed, but the passengers would be stopped inside the vehicle almost instantly, thus an enormous acceleration in very short time, that could be lethal.
That is why car designers work with crumble zones, rather than the car stopping immediately areas of the car that do not contain passengers should when a suitably high force is applied begin to crumble as to not stop the car immediately but rather take the speed out gradually. Around the passengers you would want a relatively hard "shell" to prevent stuff from hurting the passengers directly, but further out the car should be softer to make shure that the shell is not accelerated instantly. Everything in a crumble zone must be able to crumble, if it doesn't it could make it's way into the cabin and hurt the passengers. The classic to mention here is the steering column, hard iron pipe extending horizontally from the front of the car to the driver seat, set for killing at just medium speed collisions. Modern steering columns are made to break when they need to.
Crumble zones should however not be too soft, as they in that case won't be able to brake the car enough before they are "spent". There is no single optimal softness for designing a car, as different speeds of collision have different impact. Thus racing cars for instance are designed to be much harder as they are generally expected to crash at higher speeds than normal cars.
There is a lot of stuff that I haven't mentioned, but basically anything in a car, including what the passengers have brought themselves could potentially be the spearhead for a kill, or the crumble strength adjustment that saves a life.
Practically, when buying a car, taking a look at the Euro NCAP report is probably a lot better than trying to estimate if it will crumble well ;-) I know a lot of american cars don't undergo the test, but frankly, there is often a reason on top of the price for them to skip the NCAP. |
No Spam
Adult 
Gambling
Unfinished
Deception
Plagiarism
Not English
