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

The president’s car still has crumple zones. The armor plating is placed strategically in places they could stop bullets headed towards the passengers but they aren’t really integral to the car and the crumple zones should more or less still do their jobs.

Armored cars work on the premise of most large utility vehicles like buses: they’re really heavy and will pretty much bulldoze anything they crash into. Crumple zones reduce deceleration on impact by slowly collapsing the car, essentially making the crash happen more slowly. Another way to slow deceleration is to just plow right through whatever you hit, therefore not experiencing the rapid deceleration of a fatal car crash. This is what happens 99% of the time an armored bank car crashes.