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The Top 10
Safest Cars In 2008
Car safety is one of the biggest
concerns for a car owner. Your automobile is probably the
second or third most expensive thing you will ever own; it
is also, statistically, the deadliest possession most
Westerners own. Even in the United States, which has the
highest per capita gun crime rates in the world, one out of
every 7,700 handguns are involved in a fatality (both
homicides and suicides). One out of every 2,400 automobiles
is involved in a fatality.
Look at automotive safety as hedging your bet. You may be
the world's safest driver. Are you willing to bet that
everyone else on the road is? While ultimately, what makes a
car safe or unsafe is the attention of the driver, and the
training of the driver, there are features on cars that make
them statistically safer on the road.
Safety in a car comes from four broad factors: Visibility,
Momentum Transfer, Crumple Zones and Active Safety Devices.
Visibility is an amalgamation of how easy it is for the
driver to maintain situational awareness, and how responsive
the car is at the command of the driver. A highly responsive
car is less than safe if the driver can't see the hazards of
the road. A car with good visibility allows the driver to
see all the way around him for a considerable distance.
Indeed, one of the ways that SUVs provide improved safety is
by giving the driver a higher vantage point, to see more of
the traffic on the road. Ultimately visibility is the most
important consideration for avoiding auto accidents in the
first place, and acknowledges that it's the driver that
makes the car safe, not the car that makes the driver safe.
The second mechanism that derives automotive safety is
Momentum Transfer. This is basic Newtonian kinematics, like
you learned in grade school. An object in motion remains in
motion, an object at rest remains at rest, until an outside
force acts upon it. Put bluntly, the kinetic energy of a car
is a function of the mass of the car, and the amount of
deceleration it undergoes in a sudden impact; when this
sudden impact involves a multi-ton vehicle moving at 40
miles an hour, the kinetic energy can be brutally high. Your
car's basic ability to resist this kinetic impact is a
function of its mass. Unfortunately, when the total masses
in a collision rise, so does the total kinetic energy. It is
this simple calculus of Momentum Transfer that has driven
the construction of automobiles since the 1940s, and the
reason why composite construction cars remain a hobby
market. (While composite construction cars impacted by cars
of similar weight will do less damage, the mass factor
trumps all when they get hit by a steal beast of an SUV).
Unfortunately, the ability to resist kinetic energy and gas
mileage are inversely related. You really can't increase the
former without reducing the latter. This is also why people
instinctively go for larger cars when thinking about safety.
This is another advantage of the SUV as a form factor.
Crumple Zones are how engineers define the compression zones
of a car – when a car hits, the purpose of a crumple zone is
to absorb the kinetic energy before it hits the passenger
compartment, by letting it waste itself on the engine, or on
the door frame, or on the wheel well. A lot of research (and
crash dummy time) has gone into crumple zones and
reinforcing them. If you've ever noticed the "X" pattern
under the hood your car, as you peered into the engine
compartment, that's the crumple zone's big effect – it's a
cross-stressed reinforcement plate, like a bridge, and
designed to resist the force of impact.
The last element that makes cars safer are Active Safety
Devices. The most controversial Active Safety Device is the
common airbag. Don't believe the myths about airbags killing
people; airbags save far more lives than they take, and are
mandatory in car designs since 1992 in the United States.
Passenger side door airbags are a recent innovation.
Similarly, seat belts are in the same category – both of
these devices are meant to keep you from bouncing around in
the car in the event of an impact, and in particularly, to
keep your head from going through the forward window as the
car suddenly comes to a stop. Less splashy, but just as
important, are all-wheel braking and anti-lock brakes and
stabilization systems. These are the next step in improving
visibility.
When it comes to car safety, the SUV has a lot of
advantages. It also has a huge disadvantage. SUVs create
what's called a prisoner's dilemma. While they make the road
safer for those in them, they make it much less safe for
anyone else in a smaller vehicle.
Here are the 10 safest cars in 2008;
Large cars
* Audi A6 manufactured in Dec. 2006 and later
Midsize cars
* Audi A4
* Saab 9-3
Minivans
* Hyundai Entourage
* Kia Sedona
Luxury SUVs
* Mercedes M class
* Volvo XC90
Midsize SUVs
* Acura RDX
* Honda Pilot
Small SUVs
* Honda CR-V
(Source: http://www.iihs.org/news/rss/pr112106.html)
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