How Has Car Safety Improved over the Years?
When driving, you must not only have confidence in your driving skills but the skills of other drivers too. Similarly, we must be able to trust our vehicles and the safety of every vehicle around us.
Much of the time, driving involves speeds that could easily prove fatal in the event of a head-on collision. Typically, the only thing separating us from oncoming traffic is a set of painted lines.
To complicate matters, adverse weather conditions can make the roads even more treacherous, with fog, wind, rain, snow, and ice increasing the risk of collision.
Fortunately, automakers are constantly inventing and enhancing car safety features, striving to keep consumers safe on the roads. From seatbelts to anti-lock brake systems, vehicle safety innovations have advanced exponentially in recent decades, helping us to avoid collisions, or when the worst does happen, enabling drivers to walk away from accidents without serious injury.
In this article, we look at some of the most important vehicle safety advancements to date.
Seatbelts
George Cayley is credited with inventing the world’s first seatbelt in the 1800s. The English engineer invented the device to use on his glider.
In the 1940s, Dr. C. Hunter Shelden ran a neurological practice at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California. Noticing the high number of patients arriving at the ER with head injuries, Dr. Shelden investigated early seatbelt designs, proposing the concept of a retractable seatbelt in the early 1950s.
Dr. Shelden also made a number of other safety recommendations, including reinforced roofs, recessed steering wheels, roll bars, automatic door locks, and the airbag. He is credited with making a major contribution to the automotive industry, potentially saving millions of lives.
Nash was the first US car manufacturer to offer seat belts, installing them in 40,000 vehicles in 1949. The move did not prove popular, with many buyers asking their dealers to remove the safety device. Ford started offering seatbelts as an optional extra in 1955. A year later, uptake was just 2 percent.
In 1958 Saab became the first car company to start fitting seatbelts as standard. After the Swedish manufacturer’s GT 750 was featured at the New York Motor Show, the practice of fitting seatbelts as standard became commonplace.
Seatbelts have been mandatory in cars in the United States since 1968. The first US state to make the wearing of seatbelts mandatory was New York.
Airbags
Although airbags have been around since the 1970s, the technology has improved in leaps and bounds in the past decade. The smart airbag is a recent innovation that not only senses whether a person is wearing a seatbelt, but it also identifies where the vehicle was struck, calculates how severe the impact was, and even detects how much an occupant weighs. Smart airbags could potentially save the life of a driver or passenger not wearing a seatbelt.
Many modern cars feature airbags throughout the entire vehicle’s interior, protecting front- and rear-seat passengers from head injuries. Some of today’s cars even incorporate exterior airbags that deploy in milliseconds to disperse the force of impact. When a vehicle hits the side of a car, it does so with the small surface area of its front bumper; an even smaller area if it strikes at an angle. Using an airbag to distribute this force across the length of the vehicle’s side reduces the energy load considerably, as well as the risk of injury — by up to 30 percent.
Anti-Lock Braking Systems (ABS)
Introduced in the 1970s, early ABS simply applied pressure to the rear wheels. Today’s systems are much more advanced, detecting the rotational speed of the car’s individual wheels and releasing hydraulic fluid if the wheel is rotating too slowly to prevent the wheels from locking up, which could cause the car to skid. ABS is particularly beneficial in wet and icy conditions, enabling drivers to brake safely on slippery surfaces.
Tire Pressure Sensors
Low tire pressure not only affects fuel economy, but it also hinders steering and could result in a blowout. All cars built after October 31, 2006, are required by law to incorporate a low tire pressure monitoring system, alerting the driver via a dashboard light if one of the tires is running low.
Reverse Park Assist
Many motorists are uncomfortable with reverse parking, particularly in a new or unfamiliar car. Rear parking sensors and viewscreens make the task much easier, but reverse park goes one step further by actually steering the car for you as you apply the accelerator.
Adaptive Headlights
Adaptive headlights illuminate the whole road, eradicating shady corners in poorly lit areas. Linked to the car’s steering system, adaptive headlights turn in the same direction as the steering wheel, brightening the area that the vehicle is turning into. This feature is particularly helpful where there is little to no outside lighting.
