Cars

            Two cars are travelling down a highway at 100 km/h in opposite directions. Both drivers are tired from driving all day and cross over the yellow line and hit head on. Crash! The driver of car A has remained inside the car and has broken ribs due to hitting the steering wheel. The driver of car B however is on the hood of car A and is pronounced dead at the scene, cause of death, a severe case of disobeying the laws of physics. Although both cars were heading at the same velocity one driver ended up dead while another survived. This seems like a complicated and hard thing to explain and to the untrained person it may seem that driver A just had plain luck on his side however this is untrue. Using the knowledge of basic physics I hope 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 automobiles were invented. He proposed the idea that an object in motion will continue in motion with the same speed and direction unless acted upon by an outside, unbalanced force. His theory is better known as the Law of Inertia. The driver of car B was not wearing a seatbelt and as a result was not connected to the body of the car. According to Newton's first law and object, the car, and its occupants, was moving until it hit and external force, car A. When the collision occurred the car and its cargo changed its motion and direction. However because driver B wasn't attached to his car by his seatbelt he continued with the same speed and in the same direction as the car before the collision. Driver B flew through the windshield and onto the hood of 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 deceleration as the car and avoided major injury.