Passenger safety has always been the concern of car manufacturers since the beginning of the cars industry.
Passenger’s safety concept has changed over the years. In the early days and up to the 1990’s, the concept was to make a “strong” car body to protect the car passengers. This proves to be wrong. Yes, the “strong “ chassis or the strong car body might kill you. And here is how: in physics, any object that hits another object or that hits a wall will generate a shock wave. This shock has to go somewhere. When you create a strong chassis and a strong car body, this will leave the passengers’ bodies to take the impact force by their own bodies which will cause death if the accident is a strong one.
Remember back in the 70’s and 80’s the idea that American cars and Volvo cars are strong ones? Well, this proved to be not true.
Nowadays, we all see accidents on our roads. You probably have noticed that new cars involved in any accident are severely damaged. And a lot of drivers are surprised that despite the fact that their cars are severely damaged, they walk away unhurt from the accident. This is due to the fact that cars today are made in a way that the car body will disintegrate during the accident and this will absorb the shock wave and prevent it from arriving to the passengers. Better loose the car than to lose your life or the life of your child. Don’t you agree?The ones who watch F1 races a lot will also notice that in today’s accidents during races, the car is smashed and destroyed almost completely during an accident at 250Km/h and the driver walks away unhurt.
Unfortunately Ayrton Senna was not that lucky on that bad Sunday on May 1st, 1994 at Imola when he hit the wall at 313Km/h. The car body was strong at the time that it took the shock but Senna’s body cells internally disintegrated and he lost his life in that doomed accident. And for the record, since Senna’s accident in 1994 till today, no fatal accident ever happened in F1 and no driver lost his life despite all the accidents that took place since then.
