The Physics Behind Crumple Zones

From the time the Duryea Brothers first started selling cars in 1893 to the present, car crashes have always been a big problem in the world. New safety rules and speed limits have been introduced, but the car crashes have still not stopped. Statistics show that nearly 1.3 million people die in car crashes annually. In 2016, there were around 8000 car accidents in Hong Kong itself. A lot of these deaths and accidents were caused by frontal and rear-end collisions, in which the hood or the rear of the car crashes into an object. This causes the person's body to shatter as it hits the car with more force than it can handle. Frontal collisions only accounted for 2% of the car crashes in the US. However, they were responsible for 10% of US’s
The hood and the bumpers of these cars are relatively large and are made out of soft materials. This allows them to crumple to a controllable size when the car crashes into something with a large amount of force. Crumple zones also redistribute the force of impact as most of the impacting energy is spent on destroying the hood of the car. Thus, almost all of the energy is used up before it hits the passengers. The next paragraph will explain the physics behind crumple
Materials in crumple zones can absorb up to 12 times the amount of energy than traditional metal. Road fatalities have gone down from 26.6 people per 100,000 to 4.92 people from 1975 to 2014 in Australia. “In that moment I thought everything was over, little did I know that my crumple zone would save me,” said Paul Brown, whose life was saved by his Volvo’s crumple zone. Another one of the major advantages of crumple zones is that every year, they put fewer people in the hospital. In the US, 27.5% of everyone’s tax bill is spent on injuries related to motor vehicle accidents annually. Crumple zones reduce the number of these injuries and thus reduce the amount of money spent on public healthcare. By doing this, more of our taxes go towards innovation and