Once upon a time, safety was an afterthought. When Carl Benz invented the first automobile in 1885, society paid no mind to the concept of safety. A seat that didn't have razor blade and plague-impregnated upholstery was safe enough. Those early, prototypical automobiles were nothing more than amusements, and were considered as such. Though the well-off bought them, they weren't used for daily transport as the roads weren't exactly able to cope with speeds above that of a horse-drawn carriage. About the only concession to safety in this era was the inclusion of basic headlights to see at night, scrub brakes to slow the vehicle, and human-eviscerating mechanical bits which weren't in constant contact with the occupants.

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As the new century dawned, competition in the realm of the automobile began to heat up. Hundreds of garage tinkerers like Ransom Olds and Henry Ford started their own manufacturing companies, both of those more than once. The focus of the era was cut-throat competition in its purest form. The increasingly popular automobile was gaining ground as a transportation method. They didn't require the quarter and care a team of horses did, and they offered a modern panache the carriage could not. They also afforded the safety of cabins closed to the elements, windows heated in the winter to avoid frost, and starter cranks designed to pull away rather than break the starter's wrist upon a back fire.

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Photo credit: SeriousWheels

By the late nineteen teens the myriad automakers began consolidating into a powerful group of centralized corporations, some of which survive to this day (some barely). Chrysler, General Motors, Ford, Packard, Hudson, Nash, and more had emerged from the brutal competition of the beginning years and established their niche with the buying public. Mass production was increasingly the order of the day and Americans proved very good at it. Building cars in this time was like printing money. Perhaps the most important development in the history of the automobile took place in this era Charles "Boss" Kettering developed the automatic starter, which freed motorists from the constant danger of hideously mangled limbs from starting accidents. It allowed female motorists independence and democratized the idea of a car in every carriage house. Sounds simple today, but the electric starter was and remains one of the most important innovations in automotive history.

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And so things went for the better part of three decades. The newest model would supplant the last in power, performance and style. Innovations like the keyed ignition made it safe to park your car street side following the invention of the starter. Vehicles reached gargantuan proportions but innovation came in the form of refinement, luxury, and increased power, but not really safety. Then the depression happened, killing off all but the strongest brands. Then the second world war happened.

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The war effort saw a halt to the large scale production of cars in favor of tanks and planes. But it was also a period of frenetic advancements in technology and material science, and that would show when the war ended. The returning GI's brought with them pent up demand for new cars but there hadn't been a new design penned since 1941. Most returned with antiquated designs but one plucky upstart named Tucker had safety innovations that wouldn't be standard for many years. It featured a cabin with a padded dash far away from the front seat occupants and free from protrusions which caused a great deal of injury during car crashes of that era. It also had a center headlight that turned with the wheels, but alas, Preston Tucker overextended himself and the old boys club wasn't interested in new competition, after 48 units the company closed down, but the ideas were slowly adopted. Sealed beam headlights came along in the forties and provided a huge improvement to road lighting at the time. That invention also provided the impetus for some of the first automotive standardization legislation in the US.

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As the babies of the baby boom generation came along, parents became more concerned with safety, as did the Federal Government. By the 1950's rudimentary seat belts became optional on some Ford models and three point safety belts were pioneered at Volvo. However, the thinking behind engineering hadn't yet changed much, it took Ralph Nadar's inflammatory book Unsafe At Any Speed to raise the public awareness of some of the safety problems which came from old fashioned production and the car's high speed capabilities. While it made an example of the Chevrolet Corvair, it was an indictment of the industry as a whole and the book served as a lightning rod for Washington, where legislation was passed establishing the embryonic elements which would become the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). Front and rear seat safety belts were made mandatory equipment in 1966.

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The first Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) were introduced in 1967 and vehicles not complying with FMVSS and NHTSA standards were not legal for sale in the US. Along with rising pressure from the OPEC oil embargo came mandates for laminated safety glass, bumpers designed for low speed impact, seat belt warning lights and a host of other items. Together they served to result in the overweight, under-performing, and frankly undesirable cars of the 1970s and early 80's.

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The 80's saw it's own kind of innovation however. The crumple zone concept had first been implemented in the 1959 Mercedes Fintail, but it was not widely adopted until mass market unibody vehicles became popular in the 1980s. The concept involved a reinforced safety cell surrounding the passengers and a front and rear structure designed to absorb and disperse crash force, protecting the passengers by sacrificing the vehicle. The advent of mainframe supercomputing capabilities made it possible to engineer these structures with a data driven method rather than guess and check. Also, in 1984, and FMVSS rules change allowed for lighting elements other than sealed beams. Though the change wasn't readily adopted then, it made the compound refractor and HID systems of today possible.

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Another important advancement of the era came not from the vehicles themselves, but from the method of crash testing. Rather than base crash performance on the damage to the car, the advent of data collecting crash test dummies put the focus on the passenger. "Vince and Larry"-like crash test dummies changed the way cars were designed in more ways than one. It was no longer good enough to restrain the passengers, the seat belts and automotive structure needed to be designed in a way to limit contact with the vehicle and control the passengers rate of deceleration, avoiding internal injuries as much as external. This is where the concept of passive restraints came to the forefront.

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Initial legislation towards passive restraints was vague, and led to the utterly silly door-mounted motorized seat belts, which became useless if the door came open during an impact, but eventually the rules were tightened and drivers side airbags became mandatory, followed by passenger side. While those remain the only required airbags, the continued commoditization of cars has led to an intense focus from a buyers perspective on overall safety. This in turn spawned something of a safety arms race through the latter part of the 1990's. Torso, side curtain, knee bolster, and smart airbags have become common equipment across the price spectrum. As in-car computational power and sensor technologies improved, systems like ABS became very common, followed then by various iterations of stability control.

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Following the disastrous Ford Explorer and Firestone rollover recall, and the then-popularity of the high-center-of-gravity SUV, focus was placed on roll mitigation and rollover safety. Testing for roof strength has actually been recent standardized. Another recent avenue of improvement has been side impact safety. If crumple zones worked for the front and rear, they should work for the sides. The only problem is there's not much energy absorbing space between the passengers and the skin of the doors, so the issue has presented some challenges. Side intrusion beams and multi-point door retention points as well as the aforementioned side airbag strategies have gone a long way to improving side impact safety. One of the more interesting innovations has been active vehicle monitoring by way of systems like OnStar, which is alerted by the vehicle of a possible crash condition and calls the vehicle via embedded cellular phone and sends emergency responders if necessary.

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The latest frontier in safety is augmenting the driver's focus on the road. It's now not uncommon for radar or camera based sensor systems to monitor forward traffic and adjust cruise control or apply the brakes to avoid a collision, watch the road markings to alert the driver if they drift from a lane, and monitor the car's blind spots for unseen danger.

While purists will grumble at the increasing heft of vehicles because of all these regulations, it's important to keep in mind the survivability of accidents has increased many times over since the 1960's despite considerably higher average speeds, denser road networks and more average miles driven. Going forward will undoubtedly see further innovation, and improved crash performance, and despite engineer's best efforts, all the safety equipment in the world won't remove the largest source of dangerl: the one behind the wheel.

Vent Windows
Air conditioning, to the city-dweller, is often the line separating a rugged existence from a civilized one. In the past, what you had instead was the vent window, a magnificent triangular piece of glass in the front door windows which rotated to funnel air into the cabin and cool the occupants. Crossing large expanses at high speeds means lots of fresh air, but as we transitioned to an urban population, those high speeds were replaced by sweltering traffic and air conditioning has completely replaced the vent window.

Crank Windows
Nearly everyone reading this post probably grew up with a car featuring crank windows. They're cheap, they're reliable, they're light weight and they make you exercise to get at that sweet, sweet fresh air. All reasons they're being naturally selected out of the automotive gene pool. It doesn't help that even on the most beautiful days, everyone stays bottled up with their air conditioning humming.

Keys
The idea of a key to operate your car was first implemented by Cadillac, since their cars featured the Charles Kettering starter, making ignition so easy anyone could steal your car. As time progressed thieves upped the ante with master keys or bypassed the key entirely by hotwiring. Since computer technology and the commonization of keyless entry have advanced, the metal key finds itself succumbing to the digital one. These days its common to find cars with a short-range radio frequency transmitter in the key fob and a push-button starter. They still come with emergency metal keys, but its only a matter of time before those disappear.

Vinyl Seats
If you're old enough, the searing pain of hot vinyl bench seats turning your thigh into a roast is one of your earliest car memories. You learned quick to sit on your shorts and ease down on the bench, otherwise those vinyl covers, hot as the surface of the sun which baked them, would inevitably bake stitch marks into you. Unsurprisingly, as material costs dropped and buyers decided not to maim their children, vinyl seat options are becoming scarce. Believe it or not, they can still be had on the ultra-base Toyota Prius.

Manual Transfer Cases
Driving off-road used to be a test of manliness. You had to know things; what a low range meant, how to roll a truck back and forth to get the manual lockers to engage, and most importantly, you had to be a master of the secret handshake of the non-synchro transfer case. Electronic, on the fly, fully synchronized and push-button transfer cases have made the second shifter next to the gear selector an anachronism. It will survive with the rock crawlers, but it'll never see the light of production again.

Jump Seats
When the man killed the folding jump seats in the Land Rover Discovery, a little piece of us all died. How many grew up facing the back of a Country Squire watching the world evaporate behind them at a Federally mandated double nickel? Oh sure, we're all technically "safer" without the jump seat, but are we happier? Probably not.

Being Lost
Used to be if you wanted to get anywhere, you had a Rand McNally road atlas and your sense of direction. It required spatial awareness, planning, paying attention to the road signs and at times a little luck. Now Navigation systems are becoming standard equipment on even the most basic models. In a few years, it'll be hard to avoid finding a Navi in any decent used car you look at. Discounting preinstalled Nav, portable units are crossing the magical $100 barrier, making them accessible to the unwashed masses. There will always be hold-outs clinging to their old-timey maps, but your kids won't be among them.

Cigarette Lighters
As goes the smoker, so goes the cigarette lighter. We're not fans of smoking in cars, it inevitably leads to burns in the upholstery, but having a readily available fire source in your car seems useful. If nothing else cigarette lighters provide hours of entertainment to danger loving pre-teen boys. And who will ever forget cleaning out the disgusting and too-small chewing gum repository they become for non-smoking families. On a wider note though, lighters, and they're counterparts ash trays, are some of the last remaining automotive artifacts left over from the greatest generation. When lighters disappear completely, something elegant and confident will die out too.

Hanging Your Arm Out The Window
Possibly the most insidious on the list, it's one of the greatest pleasures in a car nut's life; To hang your arm out the window on a cool summer night, cruising down the main drag, your significant other at your side, a mellow tune belting out on the radio and from under the hood. There's no greater bliss for any automotive aficionado. Much like with window vents, this past time faces an end from the evils of air conditioning, but it also will die out as a result of government regulation in the form of ever-more-stringent side impact requirements forcing windows and beltlines higher and higher. As it stands there are few cars on the market today you can hang an arm out of without significant discomfort, and we'll be very sad when there are none. In fact, in our recent Muscle Car Wars showdown, the only member of the threesome we could comfortable accomplish this in was the Mustang. Camaro? Challenger? Fail.

Photo credit: Zimbio

The Danger Of Death
To date, we've seen cars with two front air bags, knee bags, thorax bags, side curtain airbags, rear thorax bags and a center rear airbag. Cars have adaptive cruise control, can brake to a stop automatically, detect blind spot danger, protect pedestrians from a frontal impact, pretension your seat belt, brace your neck in a rear collision, and automatically apply brake force to avoid a rollover. At some point, barring egregious stupidity, cars will become essentially death proof. So much for fear as a motivator for responsibility.

Photo Credit: Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images

This setup seems as if it could come straight from the future where Idiocracy's "Ow My Nuts" is a wildly popular fully syndicated television show. Why would anyone set a skateboard, sans trucks and wheel, over a charged airbag, straddle two chairs and then submit to the pounding that follows? We know this guy did, because he's an idiot.

Epic Airbag Nutshot[Spike]

Tokyo — TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION (TMC) announced today that it has developed an SRS (Supplemental Restraint System) rear window curtain shield airbag—the world's first*—to protect rear passengers' heads in the event of a rear-end collision.

The innovative airbag deploys from the roof lining above the rear window in the form of a curtain-like barrier. Together with the headrests, the airbag minimizes impact to the head from a colliding vehicle or parts of the hit vehicle, thus helping to reduce the severity of injuries. Its use in the soon-to-be launched "iQ" ultra-compact four-seater is expected to approximately double the car's rear passenger head protection performance.

TMC has continued to actively develop and make available its collision safety technologies—resulting in such achievements as the swift market introduction of SRS curtain shield and knee airbags—to enable its vehicles to better respond to a greater range of accidents.

As a part of its efforts to realize sustainable mobility, Toyota intends to strengthen its traffic safety initiatives in the future through: 1) the development of even safer vehicles and technologies, 2) participation in the creation of a safe traffic environment and 3) activities designed to educate people on traffic safety, thereby contributing to the complete elimination of traffic casualties, which can be viewed as the ultimate hope of a society that values mobility.

[Toyota via Detroit News]

The two hood-mounted airbags would protect pedestrians' and cyclists' waists and heads (and maybe protect your windshield too); all of the internal airbags would protect damn near every square inch of your body. On top of all of this, the system also includes Toyota's pedestrian recognition system. At this point, you should probably just pull over and give your car to the pedestrian because Toyota seems to think that's the safer option. [Giz]

Nissan and Jaguar have both developed pop-up bonnets that help absorb impact from hitting pedestrians and cyclists. Also, Swedish auto part maker, Autolive Inc., has developed an external airbag that deploys from the bottom on the windshield. What's one more airbag? Modern cars have airbags all over the place so is asking for just one more that horrible? [Motor Authority]

The exemption covers 625 vehicles this year and 3,200 vehicles over the next two years. The Tesla Roadster is still going to have standard airbags, but they will not meet the Advanced Air Bag standards. As a refresher, advanced airbags are ones that protect multiple types of passengers in the event of an accident. [AP via Google]

As kids we did similar things to this with steel trash cans and M-80's. Difference was we always faced the steel bottom of the can between us and whatever explosive device we had somehow obtained and put under the can. Spare airbags are evidently the new fireworks. Despite the danger pictograms on dashboards and vast information floating around the interwebs and television, these guys failed to remember that airbags can in fact be dangerous. Slow-mo replays at the end of the clip are absolutely comical. Don't try this at or away from home, kids. – Mike Bumbeck

Related:
Oh, What A Recall! Toyota Calls In 30,000 Scion tC Over Random Side Airbag Deployment; Mercedes Recalls 61,000 C-Classes for Airbag Fix [Internal]

"The seat-mounted side airbag and side curtain airbags on certain tCs may inadvertently deploy if the door for that side of the vehicle is closed very forcefully while the tC's ignition is in the "ON" position or within 90 seconds of turning the ignition key from the "ON" position to the "OFF" position. There have been 17 cases of this condition reported."

TORRANCE, Calif., Oct. 24, 2006 - Scion, from Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), U.S.A., Inc., will launch a voluntary Safety Recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) involving approximately 30,000 tC sports coupes from the 2005 and 2006 model year. The affected tC sports coupes were produced from March 2004 to early March 2006. There have been no accidents, deaths or injuries reported related to this condition. The Scion tC is only sold in the U.S. market.

The seat-mounted side airbag and side curtain airbags on certain tCs may inadvertently deploy if the door for that side of the vehicle is closed very forcefully while the tC's ignition is in the "ON" position or within 90 seconds of turning the ignition key from the "ON" position to the "OFF" position. There have been 17 cases of this condition reported.

Scion will mail owners of the involved vehicles a Safety Recall notification via first class mail early next month. Owners are requested to contact their local Scion dealer for replacement of the driver and passenger side airbag sensors upon receiving their notification. Replacement will be done at no charge to the owners of the vehicle.

Customers with questions or concerns should contact the Scion Customer Experience Center at 1-866-707-2466.

Related:
Toyota Gets A Rear End NHTSA Probe; Toyota Initiates Massive Recall [internal]