another article on the car:
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/06/bmw-builds-a-ca.htmlBMW says GINA is built on a space frame that provides all the safety of a conventional car...
The safety rating of a car is based off of how well the frame and skeleton of the car can work to protect the passengers - the skin of a car is negligible, it exists to make the car aerodynamic. Look at Nascar cars (is that redundant? is it just Nascars? whatever) that are covered by fiberglass and plastic in order to make the cars lighter - you see horrible horrible crashes (in my case, thats why I watch nascar) and yet in all the vicious crashes, there are few injuries and even fewer deaths. Again, its the car's frame and chassis that determines the saftey of a car, not the skin.
in fact, it might even be more dangerous to have a metal skin, considering the sharp edges and entrapping effect that it can have when the metal is crumpled around the passengers. Though, a fabric skin might light on fire a little bit more easily, and make a car easier to break into, as well. :/
If you took the same car, only with metal for skin and crashed the two together at equal speeds, the metal skinned one would undoubtedly do more and recieve less damage because of differing amounts of potential energy (more mass = more momentum) if however the speeds were adjusted so that each car had equal momentum, I think you'd find the amount of damage to each car and subsequently the saftey rating to be about the same. Remember, most saftey rating tests are done by crashing cars into walls, or having fixed amounts of mass crash into the sides of different cars.
If you crashed both hypothetical cars into a wall at the same speed, more damage would end up being dealt to the frame of the metal skinned car, because of its larger mass. You might say that the "stronger'' metal skin would add to safety in this situation but the skin isn't made to add safety to the car, and whatever protection it might add would be miniscule - again, its skin, it serves to make the car more aerodynamic.
to end the quote I used above, though...
but we suspect people - not to mention BMW's lawyers and government regulators - wouldn't embrace fabric bodies.
Lets face it, the american mob is more impressionable and much stupider than us, and as cool as it looks, and as sensible it seems, I don't think its going to fly any time soon. Though with steeply rising oil prices and inflation, who knows?
