Stuff You Should Know - How Crumple Zones Work

Episode Date: May 25, 2016

If you've ever been in a bad accident in a newer car, you probably have crumple zones to thank for your life. Much more interesting than you think, these zones are designed to break apart and absorb impact, so you don't have to. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from houseforforks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Chuck, AKA Charles W. Chuck Bryant, AKA Charles Wayne Bryant.

Yeah, named after Wayne Coyne. No. Thank you. Wait, I wasn't done, and then there's Jerry. Thank you, people who voted for us for the Webby Award. Yes, yes, we won. We won the People's Voice Award. Yeah, that's three of those for us.

And a huge congratulations to another podcast that we admire for winning the Webby. Yeah. 99% invisible. Yeah, if you heard our TED Talks episode, we interviewed Roman Mars, and he won the, I guess, panel vote. Yeah.

And then we won the People's Voice vote. He's the industry darling, we're the populist darlings. Yeah, as I like, when I put it on my personal Facebook page, I tagged Roman and I said, we won the one for People's Vote, and Roman won the one based on quality. And he said, no, they're both quality. Yeah.

He was very sweet about it. Yeah. I also want to say, give us special props to Reply All, who gave us a run for our money for quite a while there in the People's Voice Award. So actually check out all of the nominees. Nominees, because to get considered for a Webby, I mean, there's a ton of podcasts out there,

and to make it into basically what amounts to the top five, you got to be pretty good. So hats off to everybody, and thank you again for everyone who voted for us, and congratulations again to Roman and 99% invisible crew. Great, we're a good company, so thanks everyone. So, Crumple Zones.

I predict this is going to be a car wreck of an episode. Terrible. This is terrible. You know what I found out? That this fascinates me way more than I thought it would. Dude, totally with you. Because I'm not a car guy, as you know. No, but it's not just that.

This is more the history of auto safety, but it also has more to it. There's some physics that we can grasp involved. Very simple physics. That makes it very attractive. It's kind of like big thing, hit big thing, make it big boom. Right, that's exactly right,

but all you have to do is switch out like force and acceleration, you sound smart. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's a lot to it that there's even some nefariousness. Corporate nefariousness. So I'm like, yeah, this story is everything, you know? Agreed, and you know what, this made me want to do episodes on Crash Test Dummies for one,

and then maybe even a couple of others, as far as... Like Ralph Nader, we should do one on him. Yeah, and maybe Airbags, just the whole car safety thing is way fascinating. It really is, and to top it all off, this article was a Grabster article, so... Well, that's why I picked it. Kaboom.

At this point, I'm just searching for his articles. Yeah, we should just be like Grabster, recommend some articles that you wrote that we should do. We've done most of them. I know. That's the problem. He needs to come back into the fray. Yeah, agreed.

So sad. And we should also shout out our colleagues here at House of Works with car stuff. Scott and Ben, I'm sure have covered this at some point. And if you're into this kind of thing, they have just a treasure trove of car, very specific, detailed car podcasts. Emphasis on the treasure.

Yeah. So that's crumple zones. If you want to know more about it, go listen to car stuff. All right, should we start with that little history bit? Yeah, why not, right? Yeah, so there's actually a lot of history to it. I found this really cool Museum of American History, a Smithsonian Museum.

They had an exhibit years back. It looked like the late 90s, early 2000s. And I just went through the page. There was this really interesting essay that they had broken up over this website. There's a lot of weird history, but initially, the idea of what caused wrecks has changed dramatically over the years.

Because at first, it was strictly driver error. Sure. Because the paradigm people were looking through was before you had horses, and a horse could spook and bolt and run somebody down, and the horse did that. It wasn't the driver.

The whole idea of a horseless carriage was that it was just a lump of metal that responded to the driver's commands. And so anything that went wrong, it was the driver's fault. And it took many, many years for people to realize, like, actually, no, there's some serious design flaws in cars. Right, we can actually make them safer.

Right, and once people figured that out, they didn't realize that the auto manufacturers had known this for decades. And then after the public finally realized it, it took a few more decades for people to finally implement it. Yeah, and I think the rationale for a while was, and it was the style of the day as well and the materials that were available at the time,

but there was a notion of, well, let's build these things like Sherman tanks, and it will make people safe. Right, and what crumple zones prove is the exact opposite is true. Let's build something that crumbles and crushes in just the right way, and that's actually much safer. And you know, it's funny, I remember

when this stuff kind of came up, what, probably mid to late 90s, when people really started to show up in normal cars. And I remember thinking, like, God, they make cars so cheaply compared to how they used to. Like, they just come apart. Now I realize, oh, they're designed to come apart. Because before it was like,

the car's not gonna do anything, but everybody inside's gonna liquefy. Now it's like, how about we keep the people inside safe and just let the car take the brunt of the impact? Yeah, and one person, there are a lot of people that owe it to this design over the years, but one person squarely in the center is a dude named Bella Barenne.

That's a nice name. There's a couple of accents and everything. Yeah, I'm not even sure if that's right, but he was a very, very, very famous engineer and inventor for Daimler Vents, holds more than 2,500 patents. Like, this guy, we all owe a debt to this dude. So many more patents than either of us.

Yes, 2,500 more than both of us put together. Do you hold a patent? No. No, me neither. This is kind of shameful, really, at this point in our life. Do you want to hold a patent? Everybody should hold at least one patent. Well, if you could patent things like stupid stuff that aren't real, like Chuck's method

for getting out of the grocery store in a hurry. Patent it. I might actually try that. What is it? Are you gonna say patent pending first before you describe it? I'll just hold onto that. Oh, maybe I could trademark that, not patent it.

No, you can patent a process. Can you? Okay. Or you can just type the little trademark symbol next to everything you say. And it's like back off, everybody. So, Bella, Mr. Barini, in 1952 had a patent. It was actually the very first one. The 1959 Mercedes-Benz W111 Fintail.

You didn't say what the patent was for. I know, I was getting to it. Oh, sorry. Beautiful car. And it was the first car to have this patent pending. Well, I guess it was patent holding by that point. Crunch zones on the front and rear of the car. Yeah, and the whole reason was these crunch zones

could be designed to absorb the impact from a crash. And if the car absorbed the impact, then the people were less likely to absorb the impact. Cause that impact, the force of the impact has to go somewhere. Yeah, it ain't going nowhere. No, and if the car is built to be rigid, the car's not gonna absorb it.

It's gonna transfer it. Yeah, like a big Ford Edsel hitting a Ford Fairlane. That's a lot of pounds of metal smashing into one another. And the people inside aren't gonna fare too well. Especially back then when they were like, what's a seatbelt? Dude, not only what's a seatbelt,

the earlier cars had plate glass windows. Yeah, they were death machines. All of the knobs and stuff now that's like touchscreen before where they would stick out. So you just take one and go right through your forehead into your brain. Yeah, just getting paled. Dashboards, dashboards weren't even padded.

It was a steel bar that would just take the top of your head, clean off. Yeah, and then the cars ran on nuclear fuel. Basically, it might as well. Yeah, it was amazing. I know that they've done side by side examples these days where they crashed an old car. Cause people were like,

the old cars were built like tanks. And so they would do the same miles per hour for like a Volvo compared to like a 1957 Ford. And you know, it's obvious what happens. You just go, like there was a point in time where the common wisdom was you didn't wear a seatbelt even if you had it. Cause you would prefer to be thrown from the car

cause it was so deadly inside the car. And there's actually a very famous. Dead ejector seats. Pretty much, yeah. There's a famous reader's digest article that really captured public opinion back in 1935. It's called Ed's and Sudden Death. And it's just like really gory and gruesome.

And it's talking about like, these cars are death traps. We need to do better than this. Yeah. And they weren't even going that fast back then. No. You know. All right. So these days, it's all proprietary, the exact features and specifics of crumple zones

because these car manufacturers, they have their own methods and they don't want to share that with everyone. Makes sense. That's fine as long as they're building it. That's right. But in general, what we're talking about are frame designs where certain parts of the frame

and the car bend and collapse in such a way that it keeps the people and things like the gas tank safe. Right. Because you don't want that gas tank exploding either, which we'll get to. Right. So let's talk about what a crash is, right? Yeah. A crash is where an object with mass

traveling at a certain rate collides with another object. With mass. Yes. Yes. And when that happens, force is created, right? And... Yeah. Well, I was going to say, if people are saying, well, what if you don't hit a car?

You're going to hit a street. You're going to tumble. You're going to hit a telephone pole. Right. Something is going to make impact. Right. Yeah. So what's happening when you have impact

is you are, technically, you're accelerating. But logically, you should just call it decelerating in the case of a crash. Yeah. But it's still, scientifically, it's still accelerating. Whenever you have a change in velocity, right? Okay. So when you hit something in your car

and you decelerate quickly, that force is transferred. The force is the mass times the rate of deceleration. Right? So another way to put it is, how bad you're messed up equals how heavy the car is and the object that hits, times how quickly and suddenly it stops.

Yeah. So you can actually take force in that equation and diminish it tremendously if you can diminish tremendously the rate of acceleration. If you can make, if you can extend the time it takes to decelerate. And you can understand this a lot more easily if you think about when you come to a stop slowly

at a stop sign, as opposed to when you have to slam on the brakes and you come to a stop. Now, the next degree above that is when you hit like a pylon and come to a complete stop. So that's what an accident is. It's that transfer of force from one object to another through this deceleration, this rapid deceleration. Yeah, and in the case of a crumple zone,

there are two things that it's trying to do there. One is to reduce that initial point of force, initial force from that first point of contact. When you hit that phone pole or that other car, or whatever, you wanna drop that force and then redistribute that away from the people. Right, right. So the way you drop that force

is to extend the rate of deceleration. Even by tenths of a second makes an enormous impact. Well, that's all you have in the case of a crash. Right, right. So Ed points out that if you take, if you change the deceleration time from 0.2 seconds to 0.8 seconds, you reduce the total force by 75%. Huge difference.

Yeah, especially if you're in a car accident, like 75% less force being transmitted through the car is, that's preferable. Yeah. Right? So the whole point of crumple zones, the whole thinking behind them, is to basically build an area

that can change this deceleration, lengthen it out some so that the force is, yeah. And then also to kind of redistribute that force throughout the car away from the passengers. That's the whole thing behind it, it makes total sense. All right, well let's take a quick break here and we will come back and talk a little bit about how they're doing that.

Star. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Pay Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, so a car is, it can't be one big crumple zone. There are parts that need to be rigid. Yeah. Like the, if you picture a car, picture the four seats, let's just talk about a four-seater. Let's do it. I know people be like, what about the third row? There's seven of us in here.

Whatever the case, just picture a small box where the people are actually sitting. Yeah, that's called the passenger compartment. The passenger compartment, that is that box. That needs to be rigid. You don't want that crumpling. You want everything before that and after that crumpling to reduce that force and that rate of deceleration.

Right. But you want that middle to be super strong and rigid. Exactly. You don't want it to crumple because if that crumples, the people aren't protected any longer. They're exposed to all sorts of terrible stuff. Yes. So it does have to be rigid.

But again, before they made the whole thinking was, well, just make the whole car super rigid. And the problem is, there has to be something that's absorbing and redistributing that force. And that's what the crumple zone does. So they took that tank of a car and rather the whole car being that, they shrunk it down to just the passenger compartment

where it's really needed and then made the rest of the car a big crumple zone. Yeah. And then surrounded that part with airbags. Yeah. Side curtain, front and all that stuff. So that's what protects the people. But the way this article put it, man,

Ed sure has a way with words. He really does. He talked about thinking of it in terms of a car crash, in terms of a budget, like a monetary budget. And that's what that force is. And everything that happens is paying a little bit of that budget. It's spending some of it.

Yeah, spending some, taking away from that budget. Like when glass breaks, when the door, when anything, any kind of damage happens, that's spending a tiny little bit of that budget because that's energy. Right. And then eventually the budget's entirely spent and all the force has been distributed

and the accident's over, the crash is over. That's right. Right? If you can get other parts besides the passenger compartment and even more importantly, the passengers, to distribute that force, then a hundred percent can be distributed before it gets to the passengers.

Yeah, you want it to be paid down to almost nothing by the time it gets to you. I don't think it's, I get the impression, I don't think it's possible to distribute a hundred percent of the force. No, probably not. Because in that case, like the person wouldn't even, you wouldn't feel anything, right?

So, but I mean, is that possible? I guess, could you design something to where somebody could come to a complete and sudden stop in an impact and not experience any force whatsoever because all of it was distributed away from the person. Is that even possible? Well, probably not. And that's the point the article makes.

Probably not like a drivable, manufacturable car. Because that's the delicate balance they have. They still have to drive and handle in a certain way. And like when you, that's what fascinates me about this is car design. You have to take all these things that are knocking heads against one another into consideration. You know, it's got a gas tank in there.

All right. Things full of flammable fuel. Right. And it's crashing into things. Like it's amazing. It's really like that delicate balance they've walked these days to make cars as safe as they are is astounding to me.

So, there are some things that they have to trade off. Like if you have a really good crumple zone, a big one in front, you're gonna have to do something with your engine and you can only put an engine so much on top of itself before it needs to just kind of go back toward the passenger, right? Yeah. And you can only move it back so much.

And the problem is with an engine, an engine is one of the few things in the car aside from the passenger compartment that is rigid and basically immovable. Like an engine's not going to crumple and bend. It's going to transmit that force. And if that engine comes into the passenger compartment, it's gonna say hello and transmit that force

right into the people that it runs into. Yeah, and that, I mean, I remember old car wrecks where the engine's like in the front seat, you know, where the person used to be. That's not a good place for an engine to be. That's not a good place at all. No, so there are considerations you have to do in making a crumple zone.

Like so in that case, you would be like, well, it's likelier that the engine's going to kill the passenger by getting pushed into the passenger compartment. We're just gonna have to make the crumple zone a little less. And then another thing, like you said, that they have to deal with is gas tanks.

Yeah, I never thought about that. Most cars fuel tanks are in the back. And this is really cool. Most modern cars, when you get in a rear end collision, it's designed, the rear crumple zone is designed to go up so that the gas tank is actually lifted up and away from the point of collision, which is usually the hood of a car behind it, right?

Yeah, which happens in a fraction of a second. Right, so it's designed to do that. That's part of a crumple zone as well. And that's a huge improvement from the 70s, specifically with the Ford Pinto. So the Ford Pinto. Ford Pinto. Man, this one may even deserve a podcast in and of itself,

but I think in like 1970, definitely the 70s, people were dying in fairly low speed rear end collisions because the Pinto's fuel tank would break and catch flame and burn people alive. Yeah, these cars were exploding in minor collisions. And then the autopsy would show, they had like basically not even a bumper of bruise, they had just been burned to death

because the Ford Pinto gas tank blew up. And Ford got caught very famously with some internal memos where they calculated the cost benefit of a recall, as opposed to paying out lawsuits for human lives. And they said the human life, we're gonna say is about $500,000. So if X number of people see us,

we'll end up probably spending 49 million, but it costs us 137 million to recall these things and actually make them safe to protect people. So they went with the just handling lawsuits. And it was a big deal. And finally, enough of a public outcry came out about it that they finally did something. And I think they did recall some Pinto's.

And then they were like, oh, we'll just put the gas tank in front of the rear axle. So that's not exposed during crashes. And a couple of other improvements that cost like a dollar a piece. Yeah. At that point, it was kind of the Pinto. The Pinto was dead.

Yeah, they weren't selling like hotcakes any longer. No, I mean, like you wanna get a bad name for your car. Fiery Death is a good way to do it. There was a movie. Kyle, what was it? It was one of the spoof movies. Oh, it was Don't Talk, Top Secret. Was it? I was gonna say Top Secret.

She's barely tapped the tree. Yeah, tapped it. It was a Pinto that exploded like it slowed down and went, and then went, boom. I didn't think it was Top Secret though. So wasn't that World War II? It was in an acronym. Oh, okay.

Gotcha. I'm 99.99, 999% sure. That was my first thing too. My first guess. All right, so not only gas tanks, but these days with these fancy Schmancy electric and hybrid cars, you got these big battery packs and you've got toxic chemicals and, you know,

you've gotta protect that as well. If you, in the case of a Tesla Roadster, if you get into an accident, Elon Musk himself comes and pulls you to safety. That's the level of service you can get. Did you give him a mouse and mouth? Yeah. Oh wow, that might be worth it.

If you need it. No, in the case of a Roadster though, it is pretty neat though. It's got a safety mechanism. It shuts off the battery packs, drains all the electric energy from the cables, the instant it senses an emergency. Pretty rad.

It is pretty rad. What about if your car is tiny though? It's pretty easy if you've got a stretch limo. Sure. You got plenty of things to crumple. Yeah, crumple away. What about like a mini Cooper, what's this thing? Smart car?

Yeah, like a smart car. So the Grabster says, well, let's use a smart two as an example. They came up with crumple zones that they call crash boxes, one in the front and one in the rear. But the problem is these are extraordinarily small cars. You've seen smart cars before. Yeah.

It's like the kind you could put like a giant penny in the back and like pull it backward and it takes off. Yeah, it looks like a McDonald's Happy Meal price. Very much, except a very, very expensive one. Sure. But the smart car is very small. And when it does get into crash, it does have these crumple zones and they do do something.

But the engineers also had to like get kind of clever too. Like for example, I think the transmission actually turns into its own crumple zone to redistribute the force, right? Yeah, it's amazing. And they used the wheels and the tires. They were like, well, these things, they're going to be getting a lot of impact right away. So why not design the wheels, the suspension, the tires

to deform and break away or even rebound and distribute that kinetic energy elsewhere? Which is pretty awesome. It's amazing. Yeah, and so again, we should say this is proprietary stuff for the most part, but you can really let your imagination run with these things. Like all you have to do is say, you know,

like really high end sports cars, they'll use like honeycombed structures, which give great excellent strength under normal conditions. But when they're dented with enough force, they just completely give and crumple and that force gets redistributed throughout the honeycomb. Imagine more lightweight too. Yeah, I would guess so.

What do you think? Yeah. Trains, even trains use this technology. Which is pretty smart too, what they put them on the front and rear of each car compartment, right? Yeah, each passenger car. And then when the cars just start stacking up, it just gets distributed throughout the train,

rather than into the people who are trying to eat their sales very steak. All right, well, let's take another break and we'll come back and finish up with a little bit on everyone's favorite topic of the Stuff You Should Know Army, NASCAR. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound

like Poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, the Grabster mentions a crash in this article, Michael Wall Trips. Thera Wall Trip.

No, Michael Wall Trips. Michael. Crash at Bristol in 1990. Did you look it up? It's pretty bad. It's insane that he not only survived, like they show him right after the crash, like waving to the crowd, like, hey,

I'll be at the bar. Yeah, he probably was, too. Oh, I would have been. I would have been like, give me a flask right now. This is a 1990 and it was at the Bristol track in Tennessee and Bristol is a, it's not, it's one of the slowest, thankfully. It's not a super speedway, it's really small.

But he was going fast. Well, you're still racing cars, but it's not like he wasn't going like 200 miles an hour or anything like that. How fast was he going, Nina? I don't know. At Bristol, I'm going to get this wrong. I think, I mean, the top speeds are

in the lower 120s and 30s. He was still going over 100 miles an hour, which is several kilometers per hour. Yeah. And he just stopped all of a sudden because he hit a pylon, a concrete pylon. Yeah, he hit, instead of like another car that will move with you or a fence that will break away,

he hit something that had zero give. Now, something else that may have saved him, but it seems, it's so slight, it seems minimal. He actually hits the guardrail, a fraction of a second before he hit the concrete. Yeah. And you see some stuff kind of come off. And again, when you look at force,

that force of the collision as a budget, that spent some of that, that force when it takes force for those things to be thrown clear. But it was probably just minuscule compared to the actual impact that came right after that when he hits the concrete and just, the car just disintegrates. Well, and this was in 1990 before they had done

a lot of the safety advances that they have today in NASCAR. And Ed points out in this article, he got lucky. Like he shouldn't have survived that crash with the kind of cars they had in 1990. Right. He got super lucky.

Even if you're not a car race fan and you see these wrecks on TV where the car just flies into a million pieces, that's exactly what it's supposed to be doing. Right. And every little piece of that car you see flying off is something that has kept that driver safe. It's so funny to think like before they designed cars

to save you money in the shop after a wreck. Yeah. But it didn't matter because there's really just saving your estate money because you're dead. Yeah. So it's like this is going to cost you a billion dollars to replace this car. It's basically just totaled.

Uh-huh. But you're fine. Right. Like that's the thinking behind crumple zones basically. Yeah. The human life was more important than a bumper that you don't have to replace. Yeah.

Good move. In the 80s and 90s, actually all throughout NASCAR history up until the 2000s, the idea was a little more of that old school approach. They wanted these cars to be rigid and stiff because they performed better and they were heavier and you could drive faster and hug the road and handle better.

Yeah. But then in 2001, and you know what's, well, it's not funny at all, I followed NASCAR one time for one season. Really? In the very first because I had friends that did it and I was like, it's just driving in a circle. They're like, no, no, no.

Turning left. Just watch, Chuck. It's much more than that. Just watch. You're a smart guy. You'll get it. And so I was like, all right. I watched the daytime of 500 in 2001

and that's when Dale Earnhardt died. Oh, yeah. That was the first race I ever watched. Wow. Like all the way through. Are you like, does this happen a lot? Well, I was scared. I had something to do with it.

I don't know if you did. I don't think you're a jinx. No, but it was very sad because if you saw that wreck, it didn't appear to be that big of a deal because the car didn't fly into a million pieces. Yeah. He just kind of turned up into the wall. And all of a sudden, Dale Earnhardt's dead.

Right. I think they even played like a, they played like a wah-wah sound effect before they realized like, oh wait, he's dead. Right. Yeah. It was awful. So what happened in that case is he had what's called a basilar skull fracture.

So. Did you look these up? Yeah. I mean, this is when you're going really fast and you stop immediately. And in the case of a race car driver, their bodies are completely strapped in. Right.

But their heads at the time weren't. Yeah. And your head goes forward and your body doesn't. Yeah. And you get a fracture, a snap, where your spinal column meets your skull. That's the basilar skull fracture. Did you look it up on Google Images?

Yeah. It's awful. Man. Did you see the raccoon eyes? Uh-uh. There's actually a, you can, if you're doing an autopsy or something, one way to,

if the person has like real dark circles around their eyes and especially under their eyes, that's called raccoon eyes, and it's a symptom of basilar skull fracture. Ugh. It's pretty crazy stuff. You probably shouldn't look that up, because there's some really awful pictures of

just dead people with raccoon eyes and the tops of their heads removed and stuff. Oh, man. Well, because of that wreck, because Dale Earnhardt was such an icon of the sport, I mean, anytime someone dies, it's a tragedy. Sure.

But he was like on the Mount Rushmore of race car drivers. So for him to die in a crash, they really started taking things seriously and they created what's called the car of tomorrow, which is what they've been racing in, I think since 2008. And that is,

well, it's essentially just a car that's way, way, way safer. Yeah. We won't get into a lot of the particulars, but there's more styrofoam involved, better crumple zones. Yeah, which is a big one. I think the, I think it's called the Hans device, is what they started wearing after that,

which keeps your head attached to the seat. Smart. So it doesn't snap forward. Yeah. The drivers didn't like it as much, because they couldn't look around as easily. Right. But, you know, it's like a give and take with safety.

Sure. You don't want to die out there either. Let's put some mirrors in there. I got rear view mirror. Sure. I'll put a bigger one up. I got nothing left. Nope.

You got anything left? It's crumple zones. This is the growing auto safety suite. If you want to know more about crumple zones, type the word, those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, and since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this hundreds of doll heads. Did you read this one? Yeah. Hey guys, love the show. The lead episode hit home, because I worked for a consumer product certification company. We test everything from guitars to pacifiers

to chainsaws, and one of our responsibilities is certifying low lead content. Part of our federal code mandates that surface coatings paint on children's products and furniture contain no more than 90 parts per million of lead. This limit was originally 600 parts per million,

but it was lowered after the lead toy panic of 2007. Remember that one? The great lead panic of 2007. Yeah, I do. Do you? Yeah. I remember the Chinese toys turned up with lead in it, and everybody's like, get those things out of here.

I think I slept through most of 2007. Yeah? Yeah. Did you have mono? Sure. In our trace metals analytics lab, we test thousands of products every year for heavy metals, lead, mercury, arsenic, et cetera,

and other restricted substances. My first job at the company was to use a razor blade and physically scrape surface coatings off toys for lead testing. This job was quite tedious due to the amount of scraped surface coating needed for acid digestion and chemical analysis. The early days of your podcast definitely helped.

In one instance, our lab was asked to test only the painted eyebrows of a doll. You can imagine how little surface coating can be collected from one set of eyebrows. Due to this, I was surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of doll heads with scraped eyebrows. As you can imagine, the sites of hundreds of eyebrows all heads staring at you as your work is quite off-putting.

With their dead eyes? I just want you to know there were thousands of people working hard every day to ensure the products are safer for you and your families. Thanks, guys. Keep up the great work, and that is Matt. Thank you, Matt. Hat is off to you for what you do for a living.

Thanks for keeping them all safe and tucking us all in at night. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com. Hang out with us on Instagram at SYSKpodcast. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

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