the.com/car safety
the art of surviving a two-ton machine you insist on driving 90 mph next to strangers.
means the engineering, laws, and habits designed to keep a metal box hurtling at speed from killing the people inside or outside it.
from early cars had zero safety features because early drivers assumed skill would save them; it took decades of corpses and lawsuits to prove otherwise, starting with seatbelts in the 1950s and crash-testing in the 1960s.
seatbelt patentinvented 1885, ignored for 70 years
crash dummiesnamed sierra sam, built in 1949
airbags mandatoryonly required in us cars since 1998
star ratingseuro ncap crashes cars into barriers on purpose
for instance
volvo three-point belt — 1959 patent given away free to every carmaker
euro ncap — crash-tests new models since 1997, publishes star ratings
nhtsa five-star program — us agency rating cars since 1978