I’m tooling along today and two thoughts converged. Thank god I wasn’t speeding… One is the PowerBall drawing, and the other was that show on Discovery Channel on Side-Impact accidents and SUV’s.
Let’s assume that A) I just won that $ 180 Million PowerBall, and B) I wish to create the safest car on the planet.
Engineers, designers, dreamers. This one’s for you.
I want to spend that money to better humanity, but before I do that, I want to build a car in which I cannot die in a side-impact crash. This means that I have to create a vehicle that is capable of distributing the terrible amount of force smashing into my door, IN A SPLIT SECOND, before the inner skin of the door hits me.
Impossible? Is it really? Does it have to be? Is there a way? I’m thinking geodesic domes, I’m thinking spreading the horizontal force immediately along diagonal lines so that the door does not force INTO me. I’m thinking of a shifting compartment, so that as I am hit, I move WITH the impact and am not smashed in by the door.
I’m wondering about all of these things. Given more or less unlimited funding for a one-off build, could we indeed come up with a combination of materials and designs that would allow a car to endure a side-impact hit and have the driver not die or suffer grievous injury?
Rules: It ain’t gonna be a tank, or a Hum-Vee or any of that ilk. It needs to weigh no more than the average Mini-Van. (4,500 lbs-ish ). It needs to be created of materials that exist today.
Unfortunately, $180M ain’t gonna get you the safest go-kart in the world. I’ve read stories where car makers spend $1-3 BILLION to develop a car from drawing board to showroom floor.
If I understand your description correctly, I don’t think this is gonna do any good. If you build some sort of compartment to pull you away from the collapsing door, the impact on your body from that movement would be as bad as letting the door hit you. Maybe even worse.
If you’re really willing to make side-impact protection the number one design priority, move the driver’s seat to the center of the vehicle. Engineer it so that the sides collapse to absorb the impact energy. (Do we need to figure out a similar arrangement for the passengers, or are they expendable?) If you want to get fancy, figure out what percentage of side impacts are from the right and left, and move the drivers seat toward the side that’s less likely to be hit. That gives you a greater degree of protection on the side where you’re more likely to need it.
Mr. Blue Sky’s figure’s a bit high, though not totally inaccurate. Prototypes generally cost a car company $1 million to build, it can cost $1 billion + to set up the production line and distribution channels for a new car. Saturn set back GM some $5 billion back in the 1980s. A few years ago, Scientific American published an article about simulating car crashes in the computer to create safer designs, and it stated that the main reason car companies physically crash cars these days is because it’s mandated by law, and that they could get better results by simulating the crashes than by actually slamming the cars into the wall (it’s cheaper, too).
I’ll give you a suggestion from Preston Tucker: Make the body a unibody, but mount it on a frame as well. This lets you have the frame rails just outside the passenger compartment, so that in the case of a side impact, the car hitting you is more likely to slide down the frame rail, than it is to continue into the passenger compartment. (Or, it’ll push your car away from the car hitting it.) Admittedly, that’s all theory since no one’s done any crash testing of a Tucker (not since they rolled one at the factory back in '48), but it sounds pretty good.
If you do that, you’ll end up with a huge shock (acceleration) upon impact. I don’t think you want that.
I’d say make the passenger cage small and build huge crumple zones around it - not just front and back, but also left and right. It may have to be a single seater like an F1 racer, or at most a two-seat tandem design (one driver in front center, one passenger behind the driver).
Hmm, what about simplying taking a Volvo (one of the safest cars around) have all the standard side air bags etc, then have a custom car shop install 4" thick high-carbon steel panels along the entire left and right sides of the vehicle, strengthen the hinges and B pillar. Run another large piece of steel along the roof between the A and B pillars and another set under the floor.
It’s not really a tank but it probably would take a lot more damage before compromising the cabin. It might be over your weight limit though.
Or if you really want to get fancy some sort of reactive armour. When in impact occurs have an shaped explosive pointing away from your vehicle go off to redirect your vehicle in a more controlled manner. Basically you’d send some of that steel I mentioned earlier towards the vehicle that is hitting you, transfering energy away from your vehicle door (I’m thinking that 180 M will be useful in testing this…)
With $180M, buy yourself a nice big house and hire an army of personnel. Stay home. Pay people to go out and bring you things, make your appearences for you, etc. Pay other people to come to you, instead of vice-versa. How’s that?
What are the parameters of the side collision? “Normal” T-boning by some ditz with a cell phone and an SUV? Getting clobbered by a semi? A “The Fugitive” style getting-hit-by-a-train impact?
In the first case, I think a combination of better crumple zones and maybe reactive armor (external and internal airbags) would be very effective. But if you’re looking a something truly massive and fast, then your best survival technique might be to not be in the car when it hits. In which case you might consider some sort of ballistic ejection mechanism. Note that this has its downsides, including physical trauma from the acceleration and not working too well under bridges and powerlines, but you do survive.
It would have to be activated by an intelligent sensing system, and false positives would be a real bummer. (“Ooh, look at that plane landing on the runway immediately to our left! BOOOOM!”)
An alternative to the ejection mechanism might be a similarly triggered rocket propulsion system that forcibly moved the car itself forward or backward at high gees. Again, a problem with immediately adjacent traffic and acceleration trauma, but has the advantage of getting you out of harm’s way.
Almost all excellen offerings. And um, sorry for that double post. I’d no idea it did that. Bad form to whine twice when once was just enough
No tanks. Right. It’s a one-off and I don’t intend to sit at home instead. The idea of avoidance software is HIGHLY appealing. After all, no matter how fast a car is going, it IS going towards you from an axis not normally desired. Maybe the way to do this is to create sensors that detect approaching masses at a speed deemed ( in a nano-second ) to be lethal, then stop the car. The standard air bags will take care of the fact that you may be thrown forwards fast, but your car itself may indeed have stopped you from being struck.
Unless ( and this is not my original scenario at all ), your car is hit by another car that is struck violently by a third car, the idea of a side-impact is typical and one of a few scenarios. The classic T-Bone when someone runs a red light. The classic T-Bone from an approaching angle when someone cuts a turn badly across traffic. In both of those situations, the car doesn’t materialize. There is a second or two before impact. Sometimes just a second- when your car might very well sense impending doom and react faster than you can by stopping your car.
Of course, it could be argued that you could spend a million taking every professional driving course out there
Using this for side impacts might be harder, as you’d need to make the system account for high speed merging (it would really suck if your car went into super-duper stop mode on the highway).
Round detachable passenger compartment set upon a rectangular wheeled frame. Think a cue ball set on and into the soft part of a chalkboard eraser.
When impacted from any side, front or back - the round compartment detaches and rolls away from the accident.
Granted, after about 3 miles of rolling over and over and over, you might lose your rice pee lunch and wish you were dead, but you would be alive.
THAT was very funny. Interesting idea and in fact, one that could be built. A Geodesic Dome Passenger Compartment, resting into a car frame. That’s all most cars are- a box sitting over a machine. The dome is faceted and will not roll…
