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The Past and Future of Car Safety

Car safety combines the technology and regulations put in place to protect drivers, passengers and pedestrians . This has become increasingly relevant as humans have adopted cars as the preferred means of transportation. In the United States, in 2020 there were approximately 287 million vehicles.

This is a far cry from the 8 million vehicles there were in the US in 1920. There are not only many cars in America but they are also being used at a high frequency. According to Statista’s Global Consumer Survey, 86 percent of American commuters use their own car to move between home and work, making it by far the most popular way of commuting.

As the use of cars continues to increase, new technology paired with new regulations will help save lives and minimize accidents.

Car Safety Technology

The First Car

The first automobile

The first gasoline powered automobile is credited to the Carl Benz in 1886. “On January 29, 1886, Carl Benz applied for a patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine.” The patent – number 37435 – may be regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile.”  The car was compact with a one-cylinder four-stroke engine with a tubular steel frame and three wire-spoked wheels. The relatively basic car did not have any of the safety features such as a seat belt or airbags that modern drivers take for granted.

Air Bags

The first airbags were credited independently to German engineer Walter Linderer and to American John Hetrick. The patents for the technology were registered in 1951 and issued in 1953. The airbag was based on a compressed air system, either released by bumper contact or by the driver.  Later research in the 1960s found that the compressed air system could not inflate the airbag fast enough for maximum safety. This meant that this type airbag wasn’t practical for widespread use.

In 1964, an engineer in Japan by the name of Yasuzaburou Kobori developed a new airbag system. Instead of using compressed air the airbag used a small explosive device to rapidly inflate the airbag.

In 1967, Allen Breed improved crash detection to trigger airbags faster. His sensor was a mechanically-based ball-in-tube component for crash detection, an electromechanical sensor with a steel ball attached to a tube by a magnet that would inflate an airbag in under 30 milliseconds.

Airbags started out as an optional add-on for drivers. Initially, they were viewed by most car buyers as unnecessary and too expensive. The technology would prove to be effective with time. A study conducted from 1985-1993 found that airbags reduced fatality by 24 percent in frontal crashes and 16 percent in all crashes when compared equipped with only seat belts. This effectiveness combined with regulations made airbags a staple of every modern car.

2-point seat belt

3-point seat belt

Seat Belts

The seat belt wasn’t initially invented for airplanes not cars. “The seat belt was invented by George Cayley, an English engineer in the late 1800’s who created these belts to help keep pilots inside their gliders.” Decades later in the 1930s American physicians tested two-point lap belts and immediately saw their effectiveness. They began urging car manufacturers to provide seat belts in all new cars.

In 1962, Swedish engineer Nils Bohlin patented the three-point seat belt. The new seat belt consisted of two straps that joined at the hip level and fastened into a single anchor point. What made this three-point seat belt more effective than the traditional two-point seat belt was its ability to retain both the upper and lower body in the case of a crash. The less effective traditional belt mainly retained the lower body. The use of three-point seat belts has been estimated to reduce the risk of fatalities and serious injuries from collisions by about 50 percent  compared to no seat belts at all.

Crumple Zones

Crumple Zone after crash

Crumple zones are an engineering innovation which causes the car frame to absorb more of an impact without transferring that energy to the occupants of the vehicle. The technology was first introduced as a safety feature by Mercedes Benz in the 1950s. Cars before the 1950s had a stiff and solid outer structure that stood up to serious impacts. Mercedes Benz purposefully weakened this outer structure to protect passengers. This was meant to decrease the impulse of the impact by increasing the amount of time. The impulse in a crash equals all forces divided by the change in time. This means that the impulse and change in time have an inverse relationship. If the crumple zone doubles the change in time then it also cuts the impulse in half. In modern cars, plastics and polymer composites are used in crumple zones to greater increase the change in time.

Rear-View Camera

Rear-view cameras help drivers to have a comprehensive view of what its behind their vehicle without needing to turn their necks. This is useful for parallel parking as well as pulling out of driveways. In 1956, the Buick Centurion concept car was the first car to have a rear-view camera. Created by Chuck Jordan, the system comprised a television camera mounted atop the V-shaped trunk and a small TV in an oval-shaped section in the center of the dashboard. The rear-view camera concept was not initially adopted for commercial use, but would become more popular later in the century. In 1991, the Toyota Soarer Limited was the first production vehicle to incorporate a rear-view camera. The technology would eventually transition from being just in luxury vehicles to being the standard in modern cars. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, nearly 300 people are killed and 18,000 injured by drivers who mistakenly back over them. Most of the victims are young children because they are shorter and harder to spot. It is estimated that rear-view cameras reduce 90% of these back-over incidents.

Car Safety Regulations

In addition to safety features for drivers and passengers, the regulation of vehicles protects other drivers and pedestrians. Among the regulations are speed limits, prohibiting drunk driving and texting while driving. Over time there have been advocates for greater regulations in motor vehicles. One such advocate was Ralph Nader known for writing “Unsafe at Any Speeds.”  The book first focused on the Chevrolet Corvair compact for having a suspension defect that Nader claimed made it easier for the driver to lose control. The impact of the book was almost immediate as congressional hearings in 1966 led to the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1970.

Speed Limits

NYC 25 mph speed limit

The first state to pass a speed limit was Connecticut in 1901 with a speed limit of 12 mph in cities and 15 mph on country roads. As cars became faster, driving speed limits were correspondingly increased. The motivation behind speed limits wasn’t always solely about improving safety. In the 1970s, many states adopted speed limits as a means to reduce fuel consumption during a time of high fuel prices. Regardless of why the speed limits were put in place they were still an effective safety measure. After Richard Nixon made the national speed limit 55 mph the traffic fatality rate dropped from 4.28 per million miles traveled in 1972 to 2.73 per million miles traveled in 1983.

In 2014, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a law lowering the speed limit in that city from 30 mph to 25 mph. This change in speed limit was meant to lower the number of traffic deaths. Research shows that a person is 70 percent more likely to be killed if they’re struck by a vehicle travelling at 30 mph than at 25 mph.  In the case of NYC the lower speed limit was effective with “2015 having the lowest recorded traffic deaths since 1910.”

Prohibiting Drunk Driving

The first state to adopt laws against drunk driving was New York in 1910. This law along with similar legislation in other states simply banned driving while intoxicated but didn’t specify what level of inebriation qualified as drunk driving. In 1953, Robert Borkenstein invented the Breathalyzer. The Breathalyzer used chemical oxidation and photometry to determine alcohol concentration. While the Breathalyzer enabled law enforcement to more accurately measure blood alcohol content, the laws weren’t strictly enforced. In 2000, President Clinton's transportation appropriations bill required all states to lower their permissible blood alcohol content to .08% by October 2003 or risk losing federal highway construction funds. An NHTSA survey indicated that the new national limit may reduce drunk driving deaths by approximately 1,000 people annually.

Texting While Driving

Prohibiting Texting and Driving

Texting while driving is defined as the act of texting while operating a vehicle in traffic whether it be moving or stationary. The new technology of mobile phones led to legislation being passed to address this new threat to driving safety.  Washington was the first state to pass a texting ban in 2007 and many other states soon followed. Research suggests that texting and driving can be even more dangerous than driving at a BAC of .08%. The results of a study conducted at 70 mph found that compared to unimpaired driving the reaction time at a BAC of .08% was 4 feet slower and the reaction time while sending a text was 70 feet slower.

Self-Driving Cars

An ongoing innovation which may transform automobile safety is self-driving cars. This technology uses computers and sensors to operate an automobile safely and efficiently without the use of a driver. As computer reaction times are swifter than those of humans and computers do not suffer from human limitations such as fatigue, distraction or impairments such as intoxication, many believe that self-driving cars will be safer for both drivers and pedestrians.

Self-Driving Car Regulations

MIT Moral Machine

A point of contention is how self-driving cars should be regulated. For human drivers there are rules of the road such as speed limits and also human specific rules such as prohibiting drinking or texting while driving. In the case where an accident is inevitable drivers instinctively lean towards protecting themselves and their passengers. In six Amazon Mechanical Turk studies participants preferred to ride in an autonomous vehicle that protected passengers at all costs. This addresses how people think an autonomous vehicle should act when they are a passenger but not necessarily how people think the laws regulating self-driving cars should be made.

Scientists at MIT posed multiple scenarios that would be relevant to regulating self-driving cars through their “Moral Machine.” Over 2 million people responded from 233 different countries and the scientists noticed some trends. It was found that people universally favored humans over animals and younger people over older people. Something that wasn’t universally agree upon was what a self driving car should do if a pedestrian starts jaywalking in front of the vehicle. Given that braking wasn’t an option, the respondents could either choose that the car should swerve out of the way harming the passengers but saving the pedestrian or the car could continue on course harming the pedestrian but keeping the passengers safe. Places with weaker governance and places that didn’t value individualism as much tended to protect the jaywalking pedestrian at higher rates. If different countries chose to regulate how self-driving cars should react when a crash is inevitable differently; car-manufacturers may have to account for these regional differences in the cars which they sell.