Two cars are travelling down a highway at 100 km/h in opposite directions. Both drivers are tiredfrom driving all day and cross over the yellow line and hit head on. Crash! The driver of car A has remainedinside the car and has broken ribs due to hitting the steering wheel. The driver of car B however is on thehood of car A and is pronounced dead at the scene, cause of death, a severe case of disobeying the laws ofphysics.Although both cars were heading at the same velocity one driver ended up dead while anothersurvived. This seems like a complicated and hard thing to explain and to the untrained person it may seemthat driver A just had plain luck on his side however this is untrue. Using the knowledge of basic physics Ihope to explain why the outcome for each driver was different and could have been avoided.Sir Isaac Newton was the first man to explain what happens in a collision even before automobileswere invented. He proposed the idea that an object in motion will continue in motion with the same speedand direction unless acted upon by an outside, unbalanced force. His theory is better known as the Law ofInertia. The driver of car B was not wearing a seatbelt and as a result was not connected to the body of thecar. According to Newtons first law and object, the car, and its occupants, was moving until it hit andexternal force, car A. When the collision occurred the car and its cargo changed its motion and direction. However because driver B wasnt attached to his car by his seatbelt he continued with the same speed and inthe same direction as the car before the collision. Driver B flew through the windshield and onto the hoodof car A. The windshield and car A acted as the necessary external force needed to bring driver B to rest. Since the driver of car A was wearing his seatbelt he experienced the same state of motion and decelerationas the car and avoided major injury. By increasing the mass of an object you incre...
