Why It’s a Good Thing Your Car Crumples

You’ve seen photos from the aftermath of bad car accidents. Vehicles smashed nearly beyond recognition, just waiting to be hauled away to scrap yards. And it’s even possible you’ve heard reports of certain newer vehicles touting their low number of crumple zones as a selling point. It’s certainly frustrating to see your beloved car smashed after an accident, but it’s also a good thing. There are several safety features in cars designed to protect you during an accident. And while car crumple zones aren’t as commonly thought of as airbags, they’re still very important.

What Are Car Crumple Zones?

Crumple zones are portions of your car that are designed to buckle during an accident. This may seem counterintuitive at first-why would you want your car to crumple during a crash? But it’s a solution to a physics equation. Force is equal to mass times acceleration. In a car accident, there’s a lot of force generated due to the large masses of the vehicles involved and the acceleration of them both. And all of that force has to go somewhere.

Why Are Car Crumple Zones Important?

Volkswagen says that “crumple zones are designed to absorb impact energy during a collision.” By doing this, “most of the energy is dissipated across these zones, and not in your passenger compartment.” If the force is absorbed by these zones, you won’t feel it as strongly. So a safer vehicle is one that has adequate crumple zones designed to protect the occupants. Inadequate crumple zones render a vehicle unsafe.

Mike Gagliardi of NBC News references this concern in an interview he did with Michael Brooks, an automotive expert. In discussing the Tesla Cybertruck, Brooks said “the vehicle’s stainless-steel construction makes him question whether it has sufficient crumple zones…the lack of which would increase the force upon occupants in the event of a crash.”

This increase in force will manifest in more severe injuries and even potential deaths. Your car is much larger and can absorb the impact much better. Comparatively, you’re much smaller. If your car doesn’t crumple, something else will need to absorb that impact. And with your body being so much smaller that a car, the force will be much more concentrated on you. That kind of force is not something you easily walk away from. You’re much more likely to be badly injured or even die if your car cannot take the brunt of the impact for you.

Source

Crumple Zones, Volkswagen.

Pedestrians, already dying at record levels, now face Elon Musk’s Cybertruck, NBC, 2023.