Cars have always had a risk associated with them when it comes to driving. You never know what someone else on the road is thinking or what they are or aren’t distracted by, so there’s a risk of you getting hit, crashing your car, or otherwise facing danger. A lot of automakers know this, and they’ve been building safety into their vehicles since the first automobile was created.
While safety features such as the seatbelt, the airbags, and even the overall structure of the car have all been designed to limit and redirect the force that a human body experiences in even a minor car crash, they have been supplemented by modern safety devices. These include cameras, motion sensors, and even systems in the car that can detect when a crash has occurred and can call emergency services if the occupants are unable to.
But all of these features and this technology aren’t the only things that we have going for us when it comes to making cars safer. There are plenty of smaller car safety features that are working to keep drivers safe, but they have never gotten the recognition that they deserve. Until now at least! Let’s take a look at some of the features that have been keeping drivers safe on the road since their inception.
The brakes often get all the credit whenever an accident is narrowly avoided or the damage done to the car is mitigated. However, the brakes are supplemented with the antilock braking system (ABS), which is designed to prevent the wheels from locking up while you brake. If you didn’t have this system, the second you press the brakes your wheels would lock up and refuse to move.
This sounds good on paper, but often whenever you brake you still need to move and maneuver the car, and the ABS allows your car to still be steered so you can avoid an accident. It can be tough to handle driving with the ABS system on, and can be even harder if the first time you gain experience with the system is in an emergency.
So don’t be afraid to witness ABS in action by watching tapes of how it handles your brakes. Being able to drive safely with these training sets might just answer all your questions, and may also save your life.
Falling asleep at the wheel is actually more common than you might think, and it isn’t just truckers and those who make long all night drives. Everyone can have situations where they are too tired to drive effectively, and this system can help. This feature scans the face of the driver, and when it deems they are too tired, it will show a message or make some other alert to keep the driver awake and let them know they need to make a stop to rest.
Sometimes we can get distracted by events happening in the car, things happening on the road, or even our own tiredness or other factors. It can often make it very easy to start to slip out of your lane marking, and that can cause a lot of issues when you are driving. Especially at night, because we can be tired and it can even be harder to see the lane markers.
But lane assist is designed to make sure that the car stays within its lane, often by providing a warning alert to allow you to course correct. Some newer cars even move to course correct themselves without you needing to intervene at all.
One of the biggest causes of death and injury for people in car accidents is around the windows. Either something comes in and shatters the window, which injures the occupants, or during a crash, the impact throws people out of the window. However, with laminated safety glass, it is designed not to break away from the frame. There will still be cracks and an impact, but the window won’t break.
This makes sure that passengers aren’t thrown out of the window, and it is such an important safety feature that they are required in nearly all cars. However, the safety glass is still largely underrated, and has likely saved many more lives than it is being given credit for.
Some of these features might be small and some might be situational, but all of them are designed to keep you and anyone else in your car safe from an accident or impact on the road. So if you ever run into a situation where you are in or are able to avoid an accident, you might be able to thank these smaller features along with the big ones for saving your life.
