Online - Road Safety

As the dark nights draw in, thoughts start to turn to how we can make motoring safer. We can turn on our car headlights and make ourselves more visible to other road users and cyclists and pedestrians can wear 'high vis' or reflective clothing.

In the early 1970s, in common with most of the big international motor car manufacturers, British Leyland developed a series of safety research vehicles (SRVs). BL’s programme was run in conjunction with the Transport and Road Research Laboratory.

The SRV cars were based on then-current products; models such as the Marina, the Mini, the 1800 and the 1300.

SRV5 introduced a particularly appealing idea, a "pedestrian catcher" to reduce the risk of injury to pedestrians who were
unfortunate enough to get run down. It featured a revised and lowered front aspect, softer bumpers, together with a safety retaining bar system. 

The theory was as follows:
- in a collision, a pedestrian would be hit on the lower part of the leg by the low-mounted bumper (to be hit on the shinbone rather than the thigh is thought less likely to break the leg or, at least, give a less complicated fracture);
- the pedestrian then topples over the car bonnet, thereby triggering the release of a safety bar which springs up to prevent the pedestrian from falling to the ground and being run over.

The idea has yet to find application on a production car but tests revealed that it worked extremely well with a dummy pedestrian! 

If you think you can do better, why not post your safety vehicle designs to our Facebook page - don’t forget to use the hashtag #ExploringBMM.