Car Safety Features

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In an age where the vast majority of the population travel by car daily, it is obvious that there are going to be accidents, and thankfully, there are many features cars can have to prevent injuries and save lives.

Firstly, seat-belts are by far the most common car safety feature, and crash tests have shown that wearing a seat belt reduces the number of fatalities in car accidents by about 50%. They work by applying the crash’s stopping force to more durable parts of the body over a longer period of time. For instance, if your car were to crash into a telephone pole at 50 mph, your speed is obviously independent to that of the car. The force of the pole would bring the car to an abrupt stop, but your speed would remain the same. Without a seatbelt, you would either slam into the steering wheel at 50 miles per hour or go flying through the windshield at 50 miles per hour. Just as the pole slowed the car down, the dashboard, windshield or the road would slow you down by exerting a tremendous amount of force on your body, which would result in injury or death.

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Secondly, another very common car safety feature is the airbag. These work similarly to the seat belt, by increasing the time taken for the person to stop, and providing a ‘cushiony’ bag to inflate, stimulated by the crash, to reduce the impact of smashing into the dashboard. Airbags are found to reduce car accident fatalities by about 30%.

Moreover, ‘crumple zones’ are another well-known and widely used car safety feature. They are structural features which are designed to compress during an accident to absorb energy from an impact. They are typically located on the front of an automobile, in order ...

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