Given the importance of planned weaknesses in cars, like crumple zones, how do armored/state cars that don’t have these features remain safe in the event of a crash?

Question

I’m thinking specifically about how breakable safety glass is important so that you can escape through a broken window if your car falls into a body of water, or how crumple zones are designed so that it’s the car that gets smooshed, rather than your brain and organs. But official state cars, like Cadillac One/”The Beast,” have bodies that are way stronger/heavier than a normal car and bulletproof glass windows, so how do they protect the occupants if there’s some kind of freak accident?

(I realize that the best plan is to avoid such a situation in the first place, but given that Cadillac One is hermetically sealed to protect against gas attacks and has electrified handles to keep people from getting in, I can’t imagine that no one has ever considered “what happens if the car accidentally ends up in a lake?”)

In: Engineering

Answer 1

Short answer: they don’t.

Everything is a compromise. To make the vehicle safe against bullets they sacrifice some other kind of safety like the safety glass.

There is an higher chance of getting hit by a bulllet than having to break the window to get out.

Same with crumple zones. They put a good driver in place, close the roads, put that car in the middle of a convoy. The chance that they need the crumple zones are now basically zero. But the chance of getting a rocket is not zero. So they sacrifice the crumple zones for the anti-rocket capability.

In the end, different danger, different safety, different compromises.