Porsche <\/a>edition of the game with the nice scenery).<\/p>\nVehicles come with a range of systems to stop the car drifting off the side of the road.\u00a0 Traction control and ABS braking help to prevent skidding. ESC (electronic stability control) kicks in to prevent oversteer or understeer. Lane departure warnings detect that you\u2019re drifting towards the side of the road where treacherous gravel lurks (in the case of rural roads). If things do go to custard, many cars have side impact protection beams, curtain or side airbags and pretensioned seatbelts to keep you safe, while the car itself usually has crumple zones to absorb the impact.<\/p>\n
Absorbing the impact is key in any crash. It\u2019s the shock of impact where all the force of Object A (the vehicle) gets transferred to Object B (a lamppost), so if Object B is hard and unforgiving, Object A takes the forces and gets damaged. If Object A is also hard and tough, all that force has to go somewhere and often gets transferred to the occupants of the vehicle\u2026 and humans tend to be soft and easily broken. There are heaps of examples in everyday life where we apply the principle of absorbing impact to prevent damage. We wear shoes with nice thick soles to protect our feet when walking or running (or at least we should). We lie down on mattresses rather than bare boards. We use mats when exercising on the floor and boxing gloves if we like slightly more aggressive forms of exercise. And there\u2019s a reason why a scrum machine is padded like heck.<\/p>\n
![\"Guard](\"http:\/\/blog.privatefleet.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Guard-Rail-300x225.jpeg\")
It\u2019s not just the cars that have to absorb impact, either. Guard rails are becoming quite a common sight around many roads in Australia, especially in high-risk areas where the amount of traffic and\/or the design of the road is likely to lead to a car going off the road. You also see them in places where going off the road is going to lead to something much worse than hitting a lamppost. You can miss a lamppost if you go off the road and may end up hitting a nice forgiving bush instead. You can\u2019t, however, miss a cliff very easily\u2026<\/p>\n
Guard rails and crash barriers will stop your car going off a cliff or skidding onto the wrong side of the road and into an oncoming B-train if you hit a patch of ice or oil. However, you may have spotted the wee problem looming here: if they haven\u2019t been designed right, they become hard, rigid objects in their own right and also cause problems when you hit them.<\/p>\n
Road designers and road safety buffs are not stupid and are aware of this problem. People around the world are thinking up ways to make guard rails and crash barriers even safer. It\u2019s a bit of a balancing act. Make the barriers too soft and flimsy and you\u2019ll just plough through them and end up going through into that rock or off the cliff.\u00a0 Make them too hard and they\u2019ll have the same effect as hitting a lamppost but with less chance of missing it.\u00a0 Make them springy (e.g. piles of old tyres like you sometimes see at car races, or tyres strung along like very ugly Christmas tree decorations like you see on the side of docks for big ships) and you get the problem of being bounced back in the other direction far too quickly.<\/p>\n
What the designers like to do is to make a crash barrier that\u2019s soft enough to slow you down but tough enough to stop you going off the road\u2026 and will allow you to slide along it so that you come to rest somewhere safe (and free from lampposts). Those fences made of very thick \u201cwires\u201d (more like metal cables) can do the trick, but they\u2019re pretty nasty if a motorbike hits them, so some road safety experts don\u2019t like them much. W-beams are \u201csemi-rigid\u201d structures that tend to the job a lot better.<\/p>\n
However, there\u2019s more to guardrails and crash barriers than just the actual barrier itself. The post the rail is attached to plays a role, as do the bolts holding the rails to the posts. The soil that the post is stuck into also affects how much energy the barrier will absorb for you.\u00a0 Designers have also started thinking about putting things between the rail and the post \u2013 kind of like a washer sort of thing \u2013 to add an extra crumple zone.\u00a0 They also have to think about what happens at the beginning and the end of the rail, and how easily a crashing car or motorbike can snag on the rail instead of sliding along to a safer place.<\/p>\n
![\"Public-Domian-W-Beam-4-1024x768\"](\"http:\/\/blog.privatefleet.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Public-Domian-W-Beam-4-1024x768-300x225.jpg\")
It would be nice if they thought about making them look a bit more attractive, too.<\/p>\n
Of course, it\u2019s much better for everyone if you don\u2019t get a very close acquaintance with a guard rail or crash barrier at all.\u00a0 Let\u2019s stop to think how you are most likely to whack into one. Cornering is usually involved, as is speed. Ice or other slippery substances can also play a role. On straighter bits, wandering attention is usually to blame.\u00a0 The moral? Go back to basics and drive properly, rather than relying on driver aids, active safety systems, passive safety systems and crash barriers to save you.\u00a0 This means that you need to slow down in the wet and cold, and don\u2019t thrash your car at speed around the corner.\u00a0 And for goodness sake, don\u2019t try to play Pokemon Go while driving!<\/p>\n
http:\/\/credit-n.ru<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the hazards of losing control when travelling at speed is that you\u2019re going to hit something. What usually springs to mind if you dare to let your imagination linger on this is hitting another vehicle. However, this isn\u2019t the only thing that you can hit \u2013 there is a reason why they do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6904"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11510,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6904\/revisions\/11510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Car-lamp-post\"](\"http:\/\/blog.privatefleet.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Car-lamp-post-300x200.jpg\")
One of the hazards of losing control when travelling at speed is that you\u2019re going to hit something. What usually springs to mind if you dare to let your imagination linger on this is hitting another vehicle. However, this isn\u2019t the only thing that you can hit \u2013 there is a reason why they do the lamppost test while crash testing, after all. Sometimes, if you lose control and\/or let your attention wander (or, in most accident cases, first letting attention wander and then losing control), you don\u2019t end up on the other side of the road but going off the edge of it. This might be somewhat better for the people in the oncoming vehicle but it\u2019s definitely not good news for you. In fact, according to ARRB Transportation Ltd., 30\u201340% of all serious and fatal crashes in Australia are caused by someone going off the road and colliding with a fixed object such as a lamppost, rock or similar.<\/p>\n