Picture this: you get in your car, put on your seatbelt, and merge into traffic. You get momentarily distracted by a notification from your phone on the passenger seat, but your car beeps loudly at you to warn you that you’re leaving your lane.
Later, your adaptive cruise control function senses the abrupt stop of the car in front of you, and engages the brake without your input. You arrive safely at the mall, thinking about nothing but the shoe store’s return policy.
All this (even the seatbelt!) would sound like science fiction to a driver in 1950. Car safety has come a long way since then.
Jerry
looks at the Mercedes-Benz
220, the first car that incorporated a hugely important safety feature: the crumple zone. The crucial crumple zone
Crumple zones are the portions of your car that are designed to absorb the impact of a collision. If all goes according to plan, the front of your car should be thoroughly squished in the event of a head-on accident.
This may sound like a paradox, but it’s physics: the crumple zone slows down the transference of energy from the oncoming obstacle, which means less force overall.
In other words, the vast majority of energy from the crash is taken on by the crumple zone, leaving only the leftovers for the people inside the car to experience.
This is why so many race car drivers of the current era survive horrifying crashes—their mangled cars are taking the brunt. It’s a highly sophisticated solution disguised as something that seems rudimentary and brute-force.
Béla Barényi, father of passive safety
Béla Barényi, an engineer for Mercedes-Benz, was the first person to use this concept on a car.
Born in 1907 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire, he was fascinated by all things mechanical, says OldMotors
. His interests led him to jobs at manufacturers and think tanks, and finally to the predecessor of Mercedes-Benz, Daimler-Benz, in 1948. Here, Barényi debuted his idea for the Terracruiser, a car that differed from others of the time in two important respects.
The Terracruiser was composed of an “extremely rigid safety cell in which the passengers were located with more deformable outer shell materials,” says OldMotors.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because this design language could be applied to any modern car—a strong cabin and a soft crumple zone.
This and other innovations, like the retractable seat belt, became part of the universe of passive safety that revolutionized the automobile experience.
The 220, safe and stylish
Throughout the 1950s, Mercedes tested Barényi’s crumple zone idea on its models, including the 1959 Mercedes W111 “Tail Fin” Saloon, also called the Mercedes-Benz 220.
This car sported an inline six-cylinder 2195cc engine, could generate 120 hp, and was spacious and stylish.
But the real draw was its safety: OldMotors notes that the company began bringing the press out to see the car’s crash tests as early as 1960.
This forced a turning point in the world of car safety. By the 1970s, crumple zones were effectively mandated for all cars—you couldn’t reasonably pass a safety evaluation without one.
So Mr. Barényi was indeed ahead of his time. He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1994, and is often called the “Father of Passive Safety.” Crumpling and passivity, are major virtues in the car world.
Even though your car has a fabulous crumple zone, you’ll still want great car insurance
. Jerry contacts your insurance company to get the details of your current coverage so you don’t have to scale a mountain of questions. You get all the best prices and coverage with none of the legwork.
And if that isn’t enough for you, Jerry can even help cancel your old policy.
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