As cars and other motor vehicles get faster, they become more and more dangerous to use. While this is the case, there are many different methods that manufacturers have used to help prevent harm to their consumers. These methods include: air bags, seatbelts, antilock breaking systems and many more. These three features are by far the most commonly known safety features for cars, and pretty much any new car that is manufactured will have all three of these safety features, not only because of the interest in keeping drivers safe but also the recently huge appeal to safety features and ratings for cars.
Seat Belts
Seat belts are by far the most common safety feature among cars. Everyone knows what they are, been taught to always buckle up, they reduce the risk of death by around 50%, and is illegal to not be wearing one while travelling in a car. But exactly do seatbelts do?
Seat belts protect drivers and passengers by strapping them into their seat. This prevents violent jerks caused by either collisions or sudden stops.
The basic idea of seatbelts is that they stop you from flying out of the windshield of your car. Why would this happen? It happens because of something called inertia. Inertia matter’s tendency to keep moving if it’s moving or keep staying still if it’s staying still, until it becomes under the influence of a force. Kind of like if you wake up in the morning felling tired, you want to go back to sleep until you force yourself to wake up. This is how inertia works. If you were traveling in a car at 60 kilometres per hour, inertia would mean that the car, and everything inside it, would want to keep moving at 60 kilometres per hour. If the car decelerates very quickly, perhaps due to a crash, everything inside the car will still be moving at 60 kilometres per hour, but the car will be slowing down very quickly. If you were not wearing a seatbelt, you would travel forwards at 60 kilometres per hour and crash through your