this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Car crumple zones are tuned to prevent damage to the car, not to pedestrians. If they were they would have airbags on the front of the car. A car can kill a pedestrian by hitting them with a crumple zone, without that zone crumpling.
This means most of the non-elasticity is in the pedestrian's body; how they flop onto the hood of a normal car, and how their bones crumple and flesh splatters before their brain and vital organs do.
Of course if a car hits a pedestrian hard enough, the crumple zone will crumple to reduce damage to the car, but that's overkill as far as the pedestrian's life is concerned.
That said, if you (unrealistically) assume the speed at impact and the geometry of the hood are the same, the difference between a car that weighs 20 times what a person does and one that weighs 40 times that is (40/41 - 20/21), or only about 2.5%.
Realistically, the weight increases the braking distance and the hood geometry makes the pedestrian's body perish more elastically.
Well, yeah. I can kick a dent into a car, but mostly I just raised crumple zones to emphasize that these are inelastic collisions we're talking about.
And yes, the breaking distance is pretty much the only way that vehicle mass is relevant for pedestrian survival.