The Analysis Of Car Crash On The Pacific Highway

The article goes into detail about a car crash that occurred due to a new road rule on the pacific highway which implemented a 40km/h speed limit when passing a stationary emergency vehicle. In the article an SUV carens into another vehicle as a result of a sudden stop due to the new rule, which ties into our SUVAT kinematics section. The Car was travelling at around 100 km/h and had to suddenly decelerate to 40 km/h in a distance of around 10m which it was unable to do, this situation closely resembles problems that we have done in our kinematics section where we would have to find the acceleration/time. The reason that the car crashed was because the reaction time of the driver was too slow as well as the distance for the car to slow down to 40 km/h was too small, If the department that put forth this rule took kinematics and SUVAT into account then accident such as these would not occur.

This article contains an exemplary example of what is to occur if knowledge of kinematics is not utilized on the road. Knowledge of SUVAT has a positive economic impact. It can be used in car crash tests where the car manufacture would examine variables of a car such as the effects of the time the car comes to a stop on the impact force and other experiments such as this to enhance systems in a car such as breaking to reduce the amount of a car crash as well as if a car crash were to occur this data would be used to reduce the damage both to the car and the persons inside it. These cars once tested would be given a rating on how safe it was; evidently the cars rated safest such as the Subaru Impreza would receive a higher number of sales compared to cars that were not rated as high, as a result of these tests car manufactures are forced to create safer cars which in turn would boost their sales.

Unfortunately as with all things, there is a moral downside to such technologies. In 2014 audi was discovered to be lying about the safety of their R8, in order to keep their reputation Audi falsely claimed that their R8 A7 A8 and A5 were all rated and approved by the Euro NCAP, Audi claimed that all of these vehicles scored a perfect 5 stars in order for consumers to feel safe buying these models and to boost their sales. Although this is a singular occurrence, car companies have been found cheating tests in order to boost the amount of cars sold, such was the case in 2015 with Volkswagen. The main issue of the article was the 40km/h limit; these traffic limiters are unsafe especially on a highway, they have been proven to cause increased traffic congestion. When vehicles are travelling at different speeds over the same network bottlenecks are created resulting in congestion. Naturally with more congestion then accidents have an increased chance of occuring as seen in the article where cars are unable to slow down quick enough.

Reference:

1. https://www.northernstar.com.au/news/watch-car-crash-video-sparks-debate-over-new-road-/3531723/