I wanted to go over an interesting study I just got done reading about car bumpers.
Not something you normally think about, but car bumpers are interesting because, they’re supposed to be rated for a certain mile per hour to where after that certain amount of impact, they’re going to degrade, they’re going to have damage to them, and they’re supposed to be 5 miles per hour.
When you look at the bumpers that have been studied most recently, these bumpers are holding up closer to 9 or 10 miles per hour.
I know what you’re thinking, that doesn’t make 9 to 10 miles an hour versus 5 is not that big of a deal, but it is because what happens is that when that bumper degrades, it’s taking more force with it.
When it doesn’t get damaged or degrade, it means that force has to be passed into someone else, and that ends up being you, the passenger.
Did you know that you are more likely to be injured in a low-speed collision than in a collision where there’s major damage to the car?
When there’s less damage to the car, all of that energy has to travel somewhere, and it travels into you.
When we start throwing things in like seat belts, headrests that aren’t positioned the right way, airbags being deployed, this is why we can get some major injuries off of something that was very low-speed because of all these factors, and it all comes down to physics.
It kind of can all be starting with bumpers supposed to degrade at 5 miles per hour, but they’re doing more and making it up to 10.