Automotive engineering is a perpetual tug-of-war between performance and safety. Here's how Honda balances pedestrian protection and vehicle strength:
Automotive engineering is a perpetual tug-of-war between performance and safety. Cars need to crumple like accordions in crashes, yet remain supremely stiff and strong while cornering. They need to be light enough to accelerate like rockets yet maintain enough structural mass to protect occupants during impacts from any direction. They need to channel collision forces around passengers yet still allow them to feel at one with the machine on the road.
and observed a variety of crash tests—I spoke with Adam Mihm, a senior engineer in the company’s pedestrian protection effort, about how the company balances pedestrian protection with the obvious need for vehicle strength and durability. Below, his thoughts on threading this particular needle. AM: There's an extreme amount of design work and iteration and iterative processing going on using the simulation technologies we have. If you take the hood as an example, I'm trying to make it very soft, so that it bends a certain way in a frontal crash. But in high speed driving, you don’t want the hood bouncing around in the wind because it’ssoft, thus distracting the driver.
AM: We can separate those modes—strength and flexibility—in our design work, and yes, we’re already applying different levels of stiffness in critical areas. For example, we talked about the high speed driving mode. So obviously, the components need some lateral stiffness so they don’t act like an airplane wing and start lifting at high speeds. But we can increase the stiffness of the frame components on the inside to try to shift the load around and prevent that kind of lifting scenario.
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