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I just saw an edition of PBS' Nova which talked about the evolution of automobile safety. They showed Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin and his three-point seat belt. He drove into a parking lot in a Volvo wagon, either an 850 or V70, with a cherry-red 240 sporting a high-mileage badge on the grille parked in the background. He demonstrated his famous egg cart crash test which helped in the design of the seat belt. I'm not sure where Nova filmed this demo, but very conspicuously in the background was a shiny, black PV444 (maybe at the Volvo museum?). Volvo was the first car company to offer these seat belts in the late 1950s, almost ten years before other cars were required to have them in the front seats.
They also mentioned Mercedes being the first car to include crumple-zones in the late 1950s.
There were plenty of car crash tests, some of which were Volvos. While the program didn't point this out, the square-shaped bricks were clear to me.
The inspiration of the air bag was interesting. An engineer in the Navy was working on a torpedo that had compressed air inside it. Suddenly the compressed air shot out of the top of the torpedo, shooting a piece of canvas into the air. This guy later started developing air bags. They were first offered as standard equipment by Mercedes in 1980.
This Nova program was produced in 1999. The title was part of a series on accidents, subtitled Car Crash. Maybe your local PBS station will rerun it soon.
Thought y'all would be interested.
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Mike F - 1984 244 DL - 202K miles 'Bob the Butterscotch Beast'
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