Moved all of my car troubleshooting and repair stuff to a new siteEngineering is full of compromises, the trick is choosing the right ones. My father, also an engineer, used to say that engineering is the art of changing the world on a budget, or something to the effect. Compare that with the approach of high energy physics! So why start looking at car design with an illustration of my neighbors maple tree laying on top of my poor Omni? If not for the the 8" diameter branch that hit the street first and helped reduce the impact on the Omni's roof, the car body would have been entirely crushed. Instead, a new windshield and a liberal application of Bondo and I was back on the road the same day. I have to admit that despite the downed power line tangled up in the tree, I got in and tried to back out from under before the city got there. When the emergency crew came and yelled at me, I gave them my stock answer, "I'm an electrical engineer, it won't hurt me." |
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The point of this sorry tale is if I'd been driving a Abrams tank (or maybe a Merkava), it's the tree that would have absorbed all of the punishment. In some people's idea of a perfect world, we would all drive around in tanks, and traffic fatalities would be limited to roll-overs and battle losses. Of course, they'd eat the roads up like crazy, aren't very fast, get horrific gas mileage and cost millions of dollars each with all the options. An intelligent car body designer has to accept from the start that the car won't win a fight with a tree (or a tank) and it's easier to enhance driver safety with crumple zones than with chassis stiffening. Of course, when some drivers insist on arming themselves with SUV's that pack enough momentum and frame stiffness to eat through those crumple zones, it's the driver of the well designed, environmentally car who suffers. |