i am about to drive the world's first
car this was invented by carl benz
patented
in 1886. of course this is not the real
thing this is a replica
but i partnered with mercedes to make a
video about car
safety right there's not a lot of safety
here
safety would come later you ready yeah
i trust you
awesome i am driving the world's first
motor vehicle when he made his patent
what did he call this invention
patent motor car this is the gasoline
tank
the only place in germany where you
could actually buy league ruin or
gasoline back then
were pharmacies they sold it not as a
cough medicine don't worry
they sold it as a stain remover a
washing agent in germany there's still
the word
wash benzene washing gasoline but no one
really knows why it's called like that
ben's had a really thing for safety his
ignition is really modern one because in
here
there's a battery inside which was
fairly new back then
and of course igniting the gasoline
oxygen fumes with an electric
spark is much safer than if you go with
your lighter there and you're
trying to ignite the whole thing let's
say the most important part of course
is the cylinder with the piston and the
piston moves front and back
this is a single cylinder engine a
single cylinder engine
this is the cooling water tank and of
course what's really important
it's the oil reservoir lubrication is
really important because you can see
everything is open here
and so all the time you lose a lot of
oil and for my colleagues it's always
a big fuss cleaning this thing up this
is the drive belt
right it's not just a drive belt it's
also your brake it's leather
so you can imagine if you do brake a lot
you get problems with the leather band
the flywheel here we need for the
ignition
we needed to start it
wow
okay see that that's really simple we
don't have a lot of stuff here
yeah we just have during crank
and this is our gas and our brake
okay you're moving us into gear yeah
whoa this does feel fast oh it even goes
the top speed of this vehicle was 16
kilometers per hour that's about 10
miles an hour
we can go fast it feels faster than i
was expecting
just 16 years later this car could go 80
kilometers per hour
this car in 1928 could already go 192
kilometers per hour
by 1938 cars had gotten incredibly fast
this car right here set a record of
432.7 kilometers per hour
that's almost 270 miles per hour and
another driver trying to beat that
record
died the same day and to this day
no one has beat that car on a public
road
the automobile revolutionized
transportation it allowed people to
travel
faster than ever before but that also
created
a really difficult physics problem which
is that if you're moving fast and you
need to stop or you hit
something you have to decelerate
incredibly rapidly and that creates
huge forces on the people inside the car
and causing injury and sometimes death
and as more and more cars came on the
road and traveled faster and faster
the number of fatalities increased
peaking in a lot of developed nations in
the 70s
but then scientists and engineers
embraced this challenge
and figured out new innovative ways to
create cars to minimize those injuries
to improve safety regular crash testing
began in the late 1950s
but what amazes me is the crash test
dummy hadn't really been perfected yet
so actual scientists and engineers drove
the cars
in crash tests people like me actually
started to do
first testing with themselves certain
accelerations how much you can suffer i
mean before you get any
injuries of course today this would be
impossible to do
when they finally did develop crash test
dummies
well then people weren't driving the
cars anymore so they needed a different
way to propel the vehicle
and so they used this a hot water rocket
to propel the car into all sorts of
crash test situations
one of the first major safety
innovations that was introduced in a car
like this
in 1959 was crumple zones that is
regions in the front and the rear of the
car that were designed to collapse
in the event of an accident i remember
when i was a kid hearing about crumple
zones thinking that that was a
ridiculous idea to improve safety i mean
why would you want your car to collapse
but the point is to increase the
distance over which the deceleration
occurs and in doing so you actually
reduce the magnitude of the acceleration
and so you reduce the forces on the
passengers
inside and that is what saves lives
this vehicle has done a 64 kilometer per
hour crash
frontal impact against the deformable
barrier this is what we
classically call the combo zone but it's
this beam here that's designed to
crumple exactly so this takes away
a lot of damage energy by by crumpling
the passenger compartment itself
is designed with different steel
qualities if you want
a high strength and ultra high strength
materials so that
it's getting stiffer and stiffer as
closer as you get to the passenger
compartment
one of the biggest challenges for car
safety is newton's first law
that says whatever is moving at constant
speed will tend to maintain that
constant speed
so if a car hits something the people
inside maintain their constant speed fly
through the windshield
and suffer a very high deceleration when
they hit the road
this is why seat belts are so important
they ensure that you stay in the vehicle
and decelerate
with it you know when seat belts were
originally introduced they were an
option
something you could pay extra for but
once we realized just how useful they
are and how they save lives well they
became
standard and now they are mandatory now
airbags were made available by
mercedes-benz for the first time in a
series production car
in 1981 and again the idea is similar
in a head-on collision you want to stop
the driver's head
from accelerating too fast into the
steering wheel and that's what the
airbag does it allows that acceleration
to take place over a larger distance
and therefore at a lower rate so it
helps preserve the driver's head
what you can also see is look at this
tiny gap here
you can barely get your fingers in
between so that
steering column has collapsed exactly
and it has collapsed
in a designed way so and after you reach
a certain
force threshold then the driver
basically pushes away
the entire steering column including the
airbag by taking away energy
and what you want to do as an engineer
for restrained systems is that you want
to
basically connect the the driver
passenger and the
occupants as tightly as possible to the
car
in a way that you know you have the most
time to decelerate
seat belts crumple zones and airbags are
all passive safety features
they're passive in that they assume a
collision is occurring and they're just
trying to reduce the acceleration on the
passengers inside
but there are also active safety systems
like the anti-lock braking system or abs
which was introduced by mercedes in
1978.
the idea with abs is to give you more
control so you may be able to swerve the
car and avoid
an accident the way abs works is by
allowing the wheels to rotate
rather than locking them up and having
the wheels slide across the ground as
might happen with traditional braking
systems
so with abs the wheel is allowed to turn
and then it's braked hard and then it
turns a little more
brakes again and by doing that in quick
succession
you allow the wheel to stay rolling on
the ground and maintain
static friction against the road that
actually increases the frictional force
and
increases your ability to decelerate and
also steer around a collision
so abs was a huge improvement over past
braking systems
all of these innovations have
dramatically improved road safety
but there's always more to be done and i
got to take a look at mercedes-benz
intelligent drive technology
which is what they're doing right now to
improve safety performance and
convenience
and i actually made a series of videos
about that over on mercedes-benz channel
you can click here to check them
out okay we're about to go into a
dangerous turn
and experience the pre-safe
i can see this guy coming across oh my
god
in this situation i have been in more
potentially like crash
situations today than i have been for my
whole life