Will electric cars become cheaper than conventional ones?

It's not going to be a surprise that is future we will all drive electric cars. They will not only be cleaner for the environment, but they will also be quicker and smoother to ride, more fun to drive and easier and cheaper to maintain. Today's electric cars like Chevrolet Volt are just the early birds of the upcoming electric car revolution.

It is clear that for the upcoming decade electric cars will be significantly more expensive than usual cars, which are powered by internal combustion engines. The main source of the cost increase is the battery, but also the high-voltage control electronics is so far quite expensive al well. And a practical electric car also needs a liquid-fuel-powered range extension engine, so you can cover long distances without waiting for lengthy battery charges every couple of hundred miles. And although the electric motor itself is a relatively simple element, it ain't your vacuum cleaner's motor in terms of power, so it's not exactly cheap as well.

What an electric car doesn't need is a gearbox, a pretty expensive part of today's mass produced cars. Also, the range exterder engine can be made much simpler, smaller, lighter and cheaper that a full-fledged car engine. Can these two points be enough to offset the cost of batteries, electric motor and all the associated electronics? It's hard to believe, but it can possibly become so. Or can it?

Why should car buyers pay for pedestrian safety festures of their cars?

What talking about pedestrian safety, I'm often being asked this question: why should I, the car owner, pay a premium for the safety of people to whom I have no relation? If this question seems odd for you (and it should), remember that people who ask it are absolutely sure that they can never, never make a mistake that can make them guilty in hitting a pedestrian. Arguments of humanism don't worth a penny for them as well. So, how do you convince such people that they do need to have pedestrian safety features in their cars?

First, even if you are 100% not guilty in a collision with a pedestrian (both directly and indirectly - i.e. not violated the speed limits, local headlights laws, etc), you will still have to prove your innocence at some level. Being suspected in a serious offense (if a victim gets serious injuries when he could walk away with bruises) is always a huge stress. Nobody would want to go through that. Also, in some jurisdictions the owner of a car holds some part of responsibility even if the victim has consciously committed a suicide by jumping in front of his car.

And then, there are children. Children don't have enough experience in this life to behave as careful as adults, and even if a child does something wrong, adults still have to compensate for the danger. Nobody wants to live the rest of their life with thoughts that someone was badly injuries simply because he saved some money on a less pedestrian-safe car.

Finally a car with a decent pedestrian safety rating

Until now, the EuroNCAP pedestrian safety test results usually looked no better than this:

That's a result of Chevrolet Cruze, which I think has set a new record for adult occupane protection (96%), which is cool for a relatively inexpensive car. But its pedestrian safety reult is still poor.

As you may know, EuroNCAP is going to significantly boost the pedestrian safety score's effect on the overall "star" rating. This will be introduced gradually over the next three years (details here), but in short, with these usual safety scores you can't dream of five stars any more.

Until now, automakers didn't rush to complain to these new strict requirements, so even in the latest test results almost all pedestrian safety ratings are totally unimpressive. Almost all, but not completely all. There is now a car whose rating would qualify for five stars even in 2012! It's BMW X1, and here's how its result looks:

And what's inteeresting, this car doesn't have an ugly or bloated hood. It looks just normal (not as normal as Cruze, of course, but it's as normal as BMW could be). That means that it's not an impossible task to comply with that pedestrian safety requirements.

What knee airbags are for

These days we hear more and more often about such things as knee airbags. They are particularly common on Toyotas, for example. But did you know that protecting your knees is not the main purpose of a knee airbag?

The main function of a knee airbag in case of a front impact is to give the body a more correct position to be more safely accepted by the main airbag. It also helps to offload some of the impact force from the lap portion of the seat belt.

So, as you can see, the knee airbag isn't just for knees, it's for the entire body.

History of the seat belt

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the seat belt, Volvo has released a 6-minute video that sums up how the seat belt was invented and how it became ubiquitous. Although this video doesn't go deep into details of the actual invention process (I hope to make a dedicated post or maybe even series of posts about that sometime), it's both informational and entertaining to watch.

The seat belt is truly the foundation stone of modern car safety science. All the safety features of a car are literally built around the seat belt. In some countries even speed limits are based on the survivability of belted occupants (that's an interesting topic by the way, I definitely plan to write about that in this blog).