Sara Mitchell at Literary Hub:
Crumple zones are a standard safety feature in modern vehicles. Upon impact, your car is designed to crush, mangle, and deform itself in a controlled manner. It absorbs the energy of the crash upon itself, rather than transferring the energy into what’s referred to as “the safety cell,” aka you. Béla Barényi, dubbed by Mercedes Benz as “the lifesaver,” engineered the first crumple zones on an automobile. Mercedes said at the time, “Manufacturers carefully avoided using the term [safety]…nobody wanted to be reminded about the dangers of driving. The topic was viewed as a sales killer.”
But Barényi was ahead of his time when he recognized that the kinetic energy of a crash could be dissipated by the controlled deformation of the vehicle. That it would buy the two most important things needed: time and space between you and your crash. It buys fractions of a second as the hood crumples, before the most dangerous part, when the car stops and your head flies forward and back again. If you’re lucky, you’ll sprain your neck, but if you’re not, you’ll break it, or suffer what’s called a basilar fracture, a break at the base of the skull.
More here.
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