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Old 09-18-2012, 03:46 PM   #8 (permalink)
basjoos
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Upstate SC
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Aerocivic - '92 Honda Civic CX
Last 3: 70.54 mpg (US)

AerocivicLB - '92 Honda Civic CX
Team Honda
90 day: 55.14 mpg (US)

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Quote:
Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard View Post
A neglected concept in vehicle safety (that I learned about from the folks at Edison2) is deflection; which is the opposite of engagement. Most vehicles today "engage" with whatever they hit in an accident, and the major problem with this is it shortens the time it takes to absorb the kinetic energy; making the peak forces on the people much greater. If a vehicle deflects away from the point of impact, then there is a much longer time to absorb the kinetic energy, and this tends to make the peak forces on the people much lower.
This is why Aerocivic/deer collisions cause very little damage to my car. The low sloped front deflects the collision energies upwards with the deer passing over the top of my vehicle rather than being absorbed into the flat front bumper typical of most cars, causing lots of $ damage and a dead deer. A fringe effect of the low sloped front with the flat radiator buried deep inside the nose is it also efficiently deflects oncoming radar waves upward, producing a very weak return echo to a ground based receiver in front of the car.

Also when having the dead stick an aircraft onto the ground, the survivable crashes are those where the aircraft approaches the ground at a shallow angle. Steep and right angle crashes are invariably fatal.
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Last edited by basjoos; 09-18-2012 at 03:57 PM..
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