Safety Features in Cars
Uploaded by matty on Nov 11, 2007
Describe the physics involved in the safety features in cars.
Introduction
Every minute, on average, at least two people die in a crash. If you read this essay from start to finish, 20 or more deaths will have occurred across the globe by the time you are done. Road traffic injuries represent about 25% of worldwide injury-related deaths (the leading cause) with an estimated 1.2 million deaths (2004) each year as said by the World Health Organization. Car crashes will also injure at least 10 million people this year, two or three million of them seriously. All told, the hospital bills, damaged property, and other costs will add up to 1-3 percent of the world's gross domestic product, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For the United States alone, the tally will amount to roughly US $200 billion. This essay will discuss how engineers have been chipping away at these staggering numbers over the past 50 years.
History
Car safety has been an issue since the automobile was first invented, and was highlighted when Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot crashed his steam-powered "Fardier" against a wall in 1771.One of the earliest recorded automobile fatalities was Mary Ward, on August 31, 1869 in Parsonstown, Ireland.
In the 1940’s there was much work being done with safety in airplanes. A lot of this work focused on the take off and landing process, as this was were most plane crashes occurred. This resulted in many improvements with the overall workings of the planes, such as brakes and engines, but also resulted in many safety features being created for the inside of the plane and its passengers. This research was the first of its kind, and many of its results started to flow over into the car-making field, and before long, safety features in cars became an industry of its own. Today there are many new products being developed every day, from night vision technology being built into windscreens, to collision avoidance systems with advanced microprocessors, radars, high-speed ICs, and signal-processing chips that take control of the car if it senses an imminent crash. There are two different types of safety features being produced today, and they can be classified into passive and active safety features. Passive safety features try to limit the damage that a car, and therefore its passenger, will sustain during a crash, and active safety features try to stop the car from...