.. as I am guessing you can still run over somebody with it.

I was just thinking yesterday “why are only the windshields laminated and the rest tempered that will pretty much explode when hit hard enough?” You see it in every test wreck, the glass flying everywhere.

Maybe this new car will be like the “canole” car in Demolition Man.

What happens when you learned to drive in one of these smarter-than-the-driver cars and you borrow your luddite friend’s late model no-power-anything stick shift clunker? “Well, I thought it would warn me before I wedged it under the back of that semi.”
This is happening even now. Couple of punks tried to steal my car, realized they didn’t know how to drive a stick, and just trashed it and stole the radio. They left it on the front seat when they realized it wasn’t a radio, it was an 8-track player.

Cars still test at like 30MPH impacts, and fail pretty badly at that. Highway safety testing is at far lower speeds than impacts occur on highways….try running tests on survival impact at 60 MPH and the rates are like 0% even on a stationary object. Cars won’t even make this by 2050 if we’re still using them by them.

There isn’t a true balance as of yet, and I doubt there ever will be, because:

the more resilient a car is, the more likely to kill a pedestrian upon impact
the less resilient (and more flexible, features like engines that go downward in a collision), the more likely to kill a driver and/or person inside the car upon impact.

The more insulation you put inside a vehicle, the more risk of suffocation and flammability. Conversely, the less insulation you put inside a vehicle, the less cushion and higher risk for internal injury.

The safer a car is to the driver, the more dangerous it can potentially be to those around them, and vice versa.

Pedestrian vs car, you can only protect from one or the other. When you have flexible materials, high speed impacts = screwed.

The idea of an injury-proof car, while commendable, is laughable at best. Yes, it is possible to do much more in the area of safety than is currently being done. However, to guarantee that a car is 100% injury-free in an accident is simply impossible, at least without some stipulations. For example, I challenge any car manufacturer to come out with a PRACTICAL car that is invulnerable to being hit by a train, or even a large semi truck. Also, unless you strap a person’s head in place, which in itself is a huge safety problem, you’re always going to have whiplash problems from high-speed crashes. It would be good to define “injury” in your guarantee.

The bottom line is that there can only be so much safety built into a vehicle. What really needs to be promoted is safe drivers and driving habits. I would much rather see people use their turn signals than worry about how many airbags are in my car (which, btw, have been known to cause injuries themselves). The focus should be on preventing accidents, not preventing injuries resulting from accidents. That’s not to say that vehicle safety isn’t important. I’m just saying that the primary focus isn’t in the right place here.