How Death-Proof Cars Work

We hope you enjoyed this podcast as much as the others. Um, And what we're talking about this week is Deathproof cars, which is just super cool. Candice. Have you ever seen the movie Deathproof? Candice? Have you ever seen the movie Ghostbusters? No? Okay, well you need to see both. Well, we'll just talk about death Proof now. I'll tell you about Ghostbusters later. So. Um, in the movie, uh, there's a guy named stuntman Mike,

and he's got this car. But I know a really cool car when I see one, And something in Mike's car is cool in aces. It's a nineteen seventy Chevy Nova and it has like a skull with lightning bolts for crossbones on the hood and he has a reinforced with steel beams, shadow proof glass, five points seatbelt, all this other stuff. Um. And the reason he has gone to the trouble of death proofing his car is because he loves to ram it into other people's cars at

high speeds and kill him. So he just generally reeks havoc on the highway. And something in Mike's car is death proof. He walks away from it several times. Uh. And it turns out that they're in real life and this is just a movie as far as we know. It's not based on any real life events hopefully. Um. But in real life there are some people who are thinking about death proof cars, but they're kind of taking it in another direction. You know much about that, Candice.

I do, and I'll redeem myself since I lack movie knowledge. This is a European commission called they Prevent Safety Research Group, and they're very lofty goal is to reduce auto accidents in Europe by fifty cent by the year. And to this end, a very well renowned European automaker Revolvo. Volvo I used to have one to I have one, and actually our producer Jerry admitted that she had one as well. So Volvos are very popular around the office. I'll love

those bees. Um, they have a vowed to make an injury proof car by and it's not going to be injury proof. And the way that stuntman Mikes is it's actually going to rely on digital features to reinforce it. And that's a that's a pretty good thing actually because stuntman Mike, he's a hard driver. But for the most part, we humans tend to fold like card tables under pressure, especially when it comes to collisions. Yeah, well they're pretty scary. And the way that our our brain works just a

short little lesson for you. You can read more about it and healthier works on how stuff works dot com. Essentially, when you perceive something that's kind of harry, your brain interpret systemulus and start sending chemicals through your body to help with your reaction to that. Your fight or flight syndrome, and some things that happen are like your breathing speeds up and your heart starts racing, and your muscles tense

up and you can't always react. And in the case of auto accidents, that's pretty scary because in fifty of rare end collisions, people don't even apply the brakes because they're too frozen in fear and actually a big whopping one point one seconds path before drivers in the phase

of an impending collision do anything at all. Yeah, which which goes to lending creams to my theory that humans are useless and I'm not the only one who thinks to see that these engineers that prevent are basically taking humans out of the equation when it comes to facing

a collision. Right. Um, there's already a lot of features on the digital car that you mentioned, which is another article on how stuff works dot com um, and there are there are all sorts of like safety features that are popping up on high end luxury ours, uh, like the blind spot detection system, which uses sensors to detect when a car is in your blind spot and you can't see it, or um collision prevention systems, which also use sensors to tell when you're coming up really fast

on another obstacle at stakes self tightening seat belts, breaks that can adjust pressure for your foot and all of these features like combined to gather are going to be a part of this injury proof car. And what's more, you know we mentioned breaks that increase pressure for you if you can't quite break as hard as you like to you before you hit something there you like myself,

um but this car could actually break for you. So completely removing humans from the equation, taking out emotionality and replacing it with hardcore rationality and the hardcore rationalities what you want in the face of a collision. And it's not just breaking for you. Some some cars will be steering out of the way for you, and the the the injury proof car most likely will be so set with sensors it will be aware of everything that's going on around it and ahead of it and behind it.

And um so in the future, when you have to swerve one way or another in the face of a collision, your car may say, okay, well, we've got a baby in a stroller being pushed by a mom to the right and a squirrel the left, and the car will swerve to the left and goodbye squirrel. So there's a lot more information on this in the article I wrote in Candice edited Can a car Really be Death Proof? You can read it on how Stuff Works dot com dot com for moral this and thousands of other topics.

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