The studio director of Top Gear lost a door mirror the other day. His and the one on the car going the other way became briefly embroiled in a territorial dispute and the result, which Frankie Goes To Hollywood said could only ever be one, was actually nil-nil.
Car plant: rubber could be used to save us from costly accidents
Somewhere in the road, there is yet another miserable pile of shattered plastic in two contrasting colours, gradually making its way towards the gutter. Apparently, this goes on all the time, although I wish to boast that I've never done it.
A coming together of wing mirrors must count as a crash, surely? If a car comes into contact with anything, it's an accident of some sort. Now I think about this, I'm amazed. A car might be expected to last for 20 years, but in all that time it is only intended to make contact, through its tyres, with the road surface, and absolutely nothing else.
Looking out of the window at all the other things there are in the world, not least all the other cars, this looks like a big ask. There can't be a car built throughout history that has gone through life without having a collision of some sort. Imagine that. Every car that ever was had a crash. We wouldn't stand for this sort of thing with railway locomotives or cruise liners.
The situation will, of course, only become worse. The number of cars is increasing, so is the number of bollards, width restrictors, traffic light posts, warning signs and pavement cafés. All these things invite a car crash.
So: given that, as fallible beings, we are incapable of driving cars as intended, it must be time to deal with the world the way the world is and design a car that can be crashed with impunity.
Once, this basic human failing was addressed with chrome bumpers, which could be beaten back to shape or simply replaced. Volvos had huge deformable bumpers, which would have been a good idea if everyone else had them as well.
But the bumper is now part of the bodywork and often in the same colour, although only until you drive into something. And, as we have seen, you will.
Recently, there have been a few minor accidents in the May household's Fiat Panda, the responsibility of one who is in every other respect spotless and makes excellent baked fish dishes, of which I have been fulsomely reminded. Nevertheless, she's crashed the car.
The Panda has small rubber inserts at its corners, a damning acknowledgement that it will be crashed at some point and that painting the so-called "bumpers" the same as the bodywork was ludicrously optimistic.
These would be great if they happened to line up precisely with similar rubber inserts in the rear bumper of, say, my neighbour's Audi. But they didn't. It follows that if the whole front and rear of both cars was made from soft deformable rubber, I'd be slightly better off. But why stop there? Why not make the whole body out of rubber?
Not only would a rubber car save us a great deal of heartache and inconvenience, it would actually make small accidents quite amusing. Traffic flow would be greatly improved if people stopped jockeying timorously for position and just bounced off each other and kept going. Why become bogged down in convoluted insurance claims? Why not just rebound and move on?
Cynics, material scientists and others with no vision will want to point out that rubber is actually quite heavy, and lacks rigidity. Well look; obviously the internal safety cell would have to be made of steel or aluminium or plastic composites, but the externals can be rubber.
I have in mind a sandwich of different rubbers increasing in density and resilience from the outside in. This would make minor collisions unnoticeable, be good for pedestrian safety and would automatically graduate the rate of occupant deceleration in a more vigorous shunt.
Most of the physics involved is already perfectly well understood. All modern cars are designed to deform progressively in an impact, so that energy is absorbed, redirected to different bits of the structure, and so on.
How much easier life would be if cars simply sprang back to shape afterwards, preferably with a comic "boing" noise. Who thought cars that deform only once, and permanently, was a good idea? It would be like having buttocks that remain flattened after you've sat on a chair. You know I'm talking sense here.
Put it this way. Does anyone out there think that footballs should be made from aluminium foil? ( telegraph.co.uk )
Thought not.
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