Car Safety essays

Car Safety essays Car safety is something which is extremely important because the roads which we drive on are much more dangerous than we think. You might think you are a safe driver, and maybe you are, but how about other drivers? Each and everyday, hundreds of thousands of cars are on our roads making the chances of a car accident very likely. That is why car safety is so crucial. You might think such an important thing as car safety should be mandatory, well it is now, but 50 or so years ago, seat belts, airbags and front/rear crumple zones were not. Seatbelts were first thought of in the 1930s by US physicians and only in the 1950s did countries require newly built cars to have seatbelts fitted and finally in 1969, 3-point seat belts were mandatory in Australia. The reason why we have seat belts are simple. They keep us from hitting the interior of the car, flying head- first into the windscreen or even smashing through the windscreen in the event of car crash or if it comes to an instant stop. You might say wouldnt we stop as the car stops? Well, according to Newtons First Law of Motion, The Law of Inertia, thats not the case. Inertia is an objects tendency to keep on doing what it is doing/moving and at its speed unless an unbalance force acts against it. Newtons 1st Law emphasises that an object will persist in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an unbalanced external force. Well the seatbelt is that unbalanced external force. Force is the product of the mass of an object and its acceleration (f=ma). The person(s) inside the vehicle has a mass and it is also travelling at a certain speed, thus they must also have a force. This is derived from Newtons 2nd Law of Motion. His second law is formulised through f=ma (force equals mass by acceleration), but force can also be formulised through f=mv-mu/t (force equals mass by final velocity mi...