A lot of what we take for granted in the modern automobile
has come along only after a great deal of trial and error - and, perhaps,
neglect. Take, for instance, the humble headrest. While a headrest design was
patented in 1923, the National Highway Transportation Association only passed a
law that all passenger cars should have headrests in 1969 - after hundreds of
thousands of spine injuries as the result of whiplash. The safety belt was
first put to use in horse-drawn carriages in the 1850s, but wouldn't be
standard-issue in cars until the early 1960s. Sadly, many of the most basic
innovations that are part of every automobile interior today came about this
way. Grim, but true. These are the most dangerous car interiors - and a few that
were unique for ushering in safety before it was fashionable.
Talk about rudimentary safety: The 1905 Darracq 200HP set
speed records in Europe but had zero bodywork,
just open chairs on a naked chassis. But, in a bit of clever ingenuity, Darracq
cleverly offset the buckets so that the passenger sat slightly behind the
driver. The advantage? In a curve, when the driver had the wheel to hold on to,
the passenger could grab the driver's shoulders to keep from being flung from
the vehicle.
1908 Ford Model T
"Safety glass" was actually invented by accident:
In 1903, a Parisian scientist who had melted a liquid plastic into a glass
beaker discovered that laminated glass would break but rarely fly apart.
Unfortunately, automakers of the day didn't care about his invention, and so
the Model T - and every other car of its day - featured a dead flat and seriously
deadly windscreen that would cut apart passengers in the unfortunate event of a
serious accident. The first widespread use of laminated glass came in the form
of gas-mask goggles during World War I. By the late 1930s, Ford had adopted
laminated glass in all of its models, calling it "Indestructo Glass."
It was made by the aptly named British Indestructo Glass Co.
1922 Renault 40CV
The 1911 Indy 500 was won thanks in part to a practical
invention: the rearview mirror. Legend holds that the race winner, Ray Harroun,
saw another driver's girlfriend or wife aid him in driving city streets by
holding up her compact mirror, which triggered Harroun's idea to mount a mirror
on the dash of his race car. Rearview mirrors on a pivoting ball mount became
ubiquitous in the mid-1920s. Even so, coach-designed luxury cars like this
Renault had such massive blind spots that a rearview mirror did little to help
during passing. And side-view mirrors on both the passenger and driver sides
had to wait until the early 2000s.
1930 Model J Duesenberg
The 1930 Model J Duesenberg was indeed gorgeous, and the
underbuilt A-pillars were considered a safety advantage because peripheral
vision could be much clearer. Unfortunately, when the pillars did collapse,
they collapsed directly into the cockpit. Thin pillars do a very poor job of
saving lives in the event of a rollover, and yet strict, NHTSA-mandated roof
(and pillar) construction had to wait until the 1970s.
1953 Mercury Monterey
There were a lot of pointy objects on the dashboards of
pre-1980s cars. Many cars of the 1950s had steering-wheel hubs that protruded
like missile ends, just waiting to impale the driver. Mercury used
aircraft-style levers for the vent settings of the Merc-O-Therm Heater in this Monterey, though it at
least put the steering wheel in front of these metal levers, which likely
prevented some level of harm. But even as Mercedes was pioneering a collapsible
steering column that would debut later in the same decade, all cars of the era
had fully rigid columns. Some of those would telescope to a steering box that
sat ahead of the front axle, and a head-on collision would drive the column
toward the driver.
1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing
The Gullwing 300SL was a gorgeous piece of machinery, but it
debuted before the age of headrests. One optional piece of equipment was a huge
leather suitcase that sat behind the passenger and driver on the rear decklid.
The case could be held in place with leather straps and metal buckles, but
should you forget to strap down the load and then get rear-ended, that heavy
tote would fly forward and smack you in the back of the bean.
1955 Ford F-100
A quick eyeball of this image tells you two things about the
1955 Ford F-100: The front bench had no head restraints, and the passengers sat
with their heads pretty close to the backlight. Practically any car of the era
lacked head restraints, leading to thousands of cases of whiplash, but pickup
passengers were especially vulnerable because a severe impact from the rear
could cause their heads to crash through the rear window. In 1969, head
restraints became mandatory in cars, and the law was updated in subsequent
decades to include trucks and SUVs.
1956 Dodge Custom Royal
Texting and driving seems dangerous? What about flipping
over a phonograph record while taking a corner in your 1956 Dodge Custom Royal?
Chrysler offered retracting in-dash record players advertised as "Highway
Hi-Fi!" as an option available in 1955 to 1960 sedans (including Chrysler,
Dodge, Imperial and Plymouth brands). But there was a catch - several, actually.
The player had to be small, so a 45-rpm record would seem apt, but 45s played
through a song in just a few minutes. So Chrysler worked with Columbia to create slow-playing 16-2/3-rpm
records. Then there were the little problems of flipping a record while
driving, the fact that the player's needle jumped unless the road was
windless-lake smooth, and that persnickety issue of what would happen to your
date's face in the event of a crash.
1958 Porsche 356
We owe the 356 Porsche an apology: It's merely the straw man
for any number of possible cars. Porsches, like so many cars of the preceding
70 years of automotive history, came with wooden steering wheels. And the 356
was a popular track car as well. Through grim trial and error, race drivers learned
that in a crash, a wooden steering wheel could splinter and penetrate a
driver's hand or chest, ending his career or worse. By the time the 356 was in
common track use, at least racers knew to swap the wheel for one made of metal.
1958 Saab Gran Turismo 750
For a break from all the bad car-safety tech, here's a car
that deserves credit for taking a leap forward in safety. The Gran Turismo 750
that Saab exhibited at the New York Auto Show in April 1958 carried a twin-carb
engine souped up for the U.S. buyer, and put out a racy 55 hp (if you got the
aftermarket tuning kit). But the GT750 was a breakthrough for another reason
that was largely glossed over: It came with optional retracting lap belts. The idea of the seatbelt was brewing in the U.S. market by that time, in the person of Huntington, Calif.,
neurosurgeon Hunter Shelden, who was treating hundreds of emergency-room
patients with head injuries resulting from car crashes. He wrote a piece that
was published in 1955 by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the
findings of which led Congress to spur the setting of new safety standards for
carmakers. But give Saab some credit for putting his idea into practice.
1961 Volvo PV 544
Not to be outdone by its cross-nation rival, Saab, Volvo
came close on the heels of the GT 750 with the first standard three-point
safety harness. The breakthrough wasn't only that the car's belt provided chest
as well as lap protection, but also that inventor Nils Bohlin realized that
past attempts at seatbelts had attached the straps to the seat itself, and
seatbacks of the era would collapse forward under the weight of the driver
during a crash. The driver might not have been thrown through the windshield,
but he would still collide with the dashboard. Bohlin devised a system that
attached directly to the frame of the car. And oddly, Bohlin's many other
inventions were just the opposite sorts of devices: rocket-powered ejection
seats for Saab jet fighter planes.
1961 Lincoln
Continental
"Suicide doors" got their name for a reason. Many
early cars didn't have locking doors, door latches opened by pressing downward,
and a downward-opening latch often served as an armrest. It was a recipe for
catastrophe. Without a seatbelt, anyone chilling in the back of a car with
rear-swinging doors could easily fall out, especially since the wind would
catch the door and blow it open. The gorgeous 1961 Lincoln Continental had
suicide rear doors, harking back to a much earlier era of coachbuilt luxury
cars of the 1920s.
1985 Yugo
There was practically nothing right about the poor Yugo,
save that it rekindled the idea that a small, entrepreneurial carmaker could
succeed. What was wrong with the Yugo's interior? It would rattle to pieces,
literally, while driving. Electrical failings also caused shortages, or fires,
to break out in the cockpit. At least that kept the drivers warm, as the Yugo
was also prone to having its heater fail.
Source : http://www.worldsbiggests.com
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