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Vehicle Safety: Modern Accessories That Preserve Lives
Henry Ford is credited with creating the affordable automobile. Because of mass production and assembly lines, by the 1920s an automobile purchase was in the reach of most of the population of the developed countries. A Ford Model T cost less than $300 USD in 1920; much lower priced than the $1,200 USD it brought in 1909. Now the masses of working class people could afford modern transportation.
The early vehicles could travel at speeds up to an amazing 50 miles per hour. The mechanical brakes of those vehicles were little better than dragging your feet though, and the steering was kind of vague, thus many accidents occurred, often seriously injuring the occupants. Improvements were made in steering, brakes, tires and suspensions making vehicles much safer to operate, but accidents still occurred, mostly from driver error than from inadequate equipment.
As the modern age of automobiles arrived, the attempts to make them safer increased. Padded dashboards and instrument panels, collapsible steering wheels and finally seat belts were added to new cars. Some of these, most notably the seat belts, were an aftermarket addition. Injuries from car wrecks became less severe even when many of the vehicles involved were totally destroyed, or at least irreparable.
The modern auto era has brought the safest vehicles ever made. There are airbags galore, three-point harnesses for passengers and driver, child seats that are like a safety cocoon for the little ones and a host of electronic safety devices: Stability control, anti-lock brakes, collision warning alarms, back-up cameras, lane departure alarms and adaptive cruise control. Some vehicles are designed with the passenger compartment as a safety box, collapsible front and rear frame members and reinforced doors and roofs. All this has been done in the name of safety and occupant protection, a worthy cause.
One area the vehicle manufacturers haven’t been able to address is “the loose nut behind the wheel.” Driver training in some areas of the world consists only of teaching the mechanics of operating a vehicle, but none of the responsibilities that go with an operator’s license. Courtesy while driving seems to be an after thought instead of a conscious action. Drivers don’t signal their intentions, pull out in front of faster moving traffic and change lanes without checking their mirrors and turning their heads. Thus we still have vehicular collisions, but at least we are a lot safer.
Hyundai Steel: Where Your Car Comes From
What do you do if you’re a very big Asian car manufacturer and you want to make sure that the steel that goes into your vehicles is top quality. If you’re Hyundai, you buy and/or create your own steel mill. If you drive a Hyundai or are thinking of buying one, you probably don’t really stop to think about where the steel came from before it became a car, but it’s quite fascinating. According to one particular advertisement, Hyundai get very picky indeed about the steel that goes into their cars and have designed the factory in question to make sure that what you get going into the car in question is steel and nothing but steel.
The process starts off with iron ore and coking coal. Ever wondered where the ore from Australia’s mines ends up? Although a good chunk stays in the country and gets used here, the majority of what comes out of our mines ends up in Asia for manufacturing. Some of the iron ends up at the big Hyundai steel plant in South Korea. The coking coal comes from a range of places, with Australia and New Zealand both doing their bit to keep the supply up. The iron ore goes into a blast furnace and is heated to become liquid metal. During this process, from the moment it leaves the boat, the metal stays in a sealed factory section to make sure that absolutely nothing gets into the molten metal – dust and other bits don’t mix with iron very well and can compromise the integrity of the iron/steel and make it weaker than it would be otherwise. Not that people have only just discovered that metal doesn’t mix with mud – this principle is used as a symbol in the Bible (Daniel 2: 41–43). Hyundai is very proud of its closed loop system where even the raw materials are kept in hermetically sealed chambers to keep out contaminants. The tight sealing has another advantage: contaminants can’t get out of, say, the coking furnace. After it comes out from storage, the iron ore goes through the process of sintering or grinding before it goes into the furnace. At the same time, the coal is coked and transported to the blast furnace. The coke is used to heat the blast furnace, and the iron is melted so the pure iron can be purified and the slag extracted. Now the iron is ready to become steel.
Steel, as you see it in your car, is an alloy of iron. During the steel making process, the unwanted elements that make the metal weaker are whipped out and the elements they do want to make it stronger are added in. At the Hyundai factory, the aim is to make a low-carbon steel (carbon is the principal element that combines with iron to make the alloy known as steel). The steel making process takes about five steps before it is carted off to become sheet metal and, ultimately, Hyundai cars. Of course, there are several more steps between the furnace and the factory floor. Cars aren’t the only thing that Hyundai produces steel for – the sheet metal also gets turned into whitegoods such as fridges and freezers, and ships. It’s kind of ironic (interesting word) that some of that metal that left Australia in the form of iron ore from the mines ultimately comes back in the form of a finished vehicle that will whizz around the streets of Sydney.
Hyundai don’t just work with raw iron ore and coking coal. They also form part of the recycling chain and take steel scrap (e.g. bits of crushed cars, etc.) and turn that into products. But they don’t use recycled steel in the cars, as the quality of the iron/steel may have been compromised. Instead, the recycled steel goes for buildings, bridges, power pylons and the like.
It’s a moot point whether Hyundai should be using more recycled steel in its vehicles. On the one hand, it’s good to know that the company wants to make sure that it only uses the best materials in what it makes so safety isn’t compromised. On the other hand, we all know that iron is a non-renewable resource. Six of one and half a dozen of the other, really. Maybe Hyundai will one day find a way of making sure that its recycled steel is just as good as the virgin steel – I certainly won’t be surprised if they do.
Find out more about the Hyundai steel factory and the process of iron ore becoming cars at the Hyundai steel website: http://www.hyundai-steel.com/ (and select English for the language).
World's Weirdest Cars- Have Your Say
Over the century plus of mass car production some real oddities have emerged. We have expressed our thoughts on the World’s Weirdest Production Cars here.
Our list is far from exhaustive so you may agree with some, strongly disagree with others, and have some strikingly odd examples that you think should have been included.
We’d like to have your thoughts that we can publish in a future newsletter, so please add your comments below.
Novated Lease Infographic
A lot of people have asked us to try and put together a simple explanation on what a Novated Lease entails – probably because we rank #1 in Google for the term. So our friends at Prestige Performance Centre were kind enough to put together an infographic for us. Hope you like 🙂
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