When a car that doesn't have a crumple zone smashes into something at high speed, its entire frame, including the passenger compartment, can buckle and its front end, including the engine if it's in the front of the car, can be pushed into the passenger compartment. The last collision, Honda–Nissan, was therefore inelastic, as you can see from the photo. The Nissan ahead of us had come to a complete stop. The Taurus hit a Toyota Camry, which hit my car, pushing it into a Nissan Xterra.īecause the Toyota driver and I were still braking, the first two collisions, Ford–Toyota and Toyota–Honda, were mostly elastic. The accident was caused by a driver of a Ford Taurus, who apparently went into diabetic shock and failed to stop or even apply the brakes when the traffic light ahead of him turned red. The car's front end was indeed crumpled, but none of the four cars' six occupants was seriously injured. I use the past tense because yesterday my wife and I were involved in a four-car pile-up on US Route 1 just outside the Capital Beltway. The first production cars to incorporate crumple zones belonged to the W111 series made in 1958–59 by Barènyi's employer, Mercedes-Benz.Īnother car that incorporated crumple zones was my 1993 Honda Civic hatchback. To protect occupants in the event of head-on or rear-end collisions, Barènyi proposed that cars should consist of three cells: a strong, rigid, central cell that would house the driver and passengers, and weaker cells front and back that would absorb the energy of a crash by deforming plastically. In 1937, when he was 30, Barènyi came up with the idea of crumple zones for cars. The bespectacled man in the photo below is the automobile engineer Bèla Barènyi.
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