The father of car safety

Béla would ride in this plutocratic motor vehicle, his beloved grandfather at the wheel, beaming from ear to ear. What little boy wouldn’t become fascinated with cars, machinery and engineering with an upbringing such as his and at a time like that? But it turns out his grandfather’s wealth wasn’t only Béla’s fortune, but all of ours as well. Because at the age of 18, a car-mad Béla began a mechanical engineering course at the Vienna College of Technology, started working for Mercedes-Benz 15 years later and by the time he retired from the German giant in 1972, he’d been awarded more than 2500 patents for his designs and inventions, mostly in the field of automotive safety.

He was the car world’s Thomas Edison. We will never know how many thousands or even millions of lives his collapsible steering columns, concealed wiper blades and stronger roof designs have saved over the years. One invention in particular – patent number 854 157, filed in 1951 under the title ‘Motor vehicles especially for the transportation of people’, specifically describing the crumple zones we’ve all taken for granted for decades – will surely have saved more than any other.

Béla Barényi may have been born with a silver spoon pressed firmly into the roof of his mouth, but his was no blessed childhood. Aged seven he suffered a hip inflammation that would restrict his mobility for life. Three years later his father was killed fighting in The Great War, after which – and as a direct result of the deep depression that followed – his family’s entire fortune was lost. Destitute, Barényi’s mother could afford to send the boy to school no longer.

And thereafter a loss of hope, the wrong crowd, spiralling bad habits, worse behaviour and a life of menial work? Barényi was never the sort. Instead he somehow paid his own way through university and immediately began working on an idea for an affordable motor vehicle, a car designed not for the wealthy upper classes to which he once belonged, but for the people. He envisaged two rows of seats, a horizontally opposed four-cylinder engine with air cooling mounted at the rear driving the back axle, plus a rounded body shape similar, one might observe, to the elegantly curved back of a beetle…

Five years later Ferdinand Porsche got hold of Barényi’s design, developed the concept further and put the original Volkswagen into production in 1938. It would be 17 years before Barényi was able to bring a successful legal action against the company for copyright infringement.

A year before the car we now know as the Beetle went into production Barényi, by now singularly obsessed with vehicle safety, moved to Berlin to begin working on what would one day become his crowning glory. Conventional wisdom at the time said that to be safe, cars should be strong enough to maintain their basic form in an accident, with uniform rigidity from bumper to bumper. Any deflection of the basic structure was a sign of weakness. Barényi, still only 30 years old, believed this to be entirely and fatally wrong.

His grand idea was for a ‘cell-based’ design with three distinct sections – a very tough passenger compartment in the middle and deformable sections front and rear.

The two crumple zones were designed to absorb energy in a collision while the passenger cell maintained its integrity to protect occupants. As with many of the best inventions, the principle that underpins the crumple zone is brilliantly elegant. It’s all to do with momentum, specifically that experienced by passengers in a car travelling at any meaningful speed. Should a very strong car with uniform rigidity collide with something hard and heavy, it will maintain its shape and come to a halt very suddenly while the unrestrained people inside continue travelling at barely diminished speed, right up until the deadly moment an instant later when their bodies smash into the car’s interior. And even if you had restrained the occupants of this car with seat belts, you could not do as much for their internal organs, which would continue to travel directly to their own impact site against the inside of their owner’s rib cage.

Barényi’s deformable crumple zones increased the time it took for an impact to happen, absorbing the force of a collision not in an instant but over a measurable period of time. The passengers (and their organs) therefore decelerated more slowly, reducing the peak force exerted upon them during the crash. And it’s no marginal gain: doubling the time it takes for an accident to happen halves the physical stress experienced by passengers.

When Barényi was interviewed for a job by Wilhelm Haspel, a Mercedes-Benz executive, in 1939, the older man intuited the younger’s remarkable vision. ‘Mr Barényi,’ Haspel is quoted as saying, ‘you are 15 to 20 years ahead of your time. You will be put under a bell jar in Sindelfingen. Everything you invent will go straight to the patent department.’ Barényi took up a position as head of a new technologies division right away, working uninterrupted and without distraction beneath his Mercedes-Benz bell jar. (Given that Barényi began developing his crumple zone idea in 1937 and was awarded the patent 15 years later in 1952, Wilhelm Haspel was clearly a man of some prescience himself.)

The first production car to feature Barényi’s crumple zones was the W111 ‘Fintail’, which went into production in 1959. It also benefited from the inventor’s safety steering wheel, which had padded impact plate at its centre and a collapsible element in the column, designed to prevent the column itself from penetrating the cabin like a lance in the event of a head-on collision.

Béla Barényi was well recognised for his incomparable body of work. He received the prestigious Rudolf Diesel medal from the German Inventors’ Association in 1967, while in 1994, three years before his death, he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in Detroit.

But appropriately enough, it was a 1993 Mercedes-Benz advertisement that best celebrated Barényi’s great contribution to the automotive industry. Alongside an image of him ran the only epithet he would ever need: ‘No one in the world has given more thought to car safety than this man.’