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
Armored cars are usually built on a much sturdier frame than most ordinary cars. This is nescessary for them to carry the weight of the armor. This sturdier frame greatly improves the vehicle’s odds of retaining it’s shape in a crash.
Armored cars are also often built to resist explosives to a degree. And that requires the vehicle’s hull to withstand extreemly high pressure differentials. Coincidentally, that requires the hull to be very sturdy & rigid.
Additionally, most armored vehicles are relatively slow and can barely achieve highway speeds. This means that a high speed crash is unlikely to occur in the first place.
Armored cars that transport VIPs are also typically escorted by a motorcade down a secured route. This means that the odds of a crash occurring are much lower, since traffic is restricted.
Finally, another safety feature of armored vehicles is that they typically have very few, and very small windows made from bullet resistant glass. These windows are unlikely to shatter or break during a crash. So it is unlikely that the vehicle’s occupants will be harmed by broken glass or ejected from the vehicle.
There are some drawbacks to armored vehicles though that can make them less safe under certain specific circumstances though.
One of the biggest problems is that mine resistant armored vehicles specifically tend to be very top heavy, and this can make them prone to rollovers just like an SUV or a truck. But, those vehicles are more like trucks than cars.
In some armored vehicles like the humvee, a rollover can be especially dangerous because the struts may not be strong enough to support the vehicle’s weight when it is upside down, and this can cause the crew cabin to be crushed under the weight of the vehicle.
If we go back to what i said earlier about the windows, that can also be a problem if the vehicle becomes submerged in water or engulfed in flames. Windows in a normal car can be intentionally broken to provide a fast way out of the vehicle. But that would be next to impossible in an armored car.
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.
The Beast is a literal tank without the main cannon, it’s bullet resistant, air tight and weights multiple tons. Not much will be hurting it or its occupants that isn’t going to completely destroy it and everything around it.
Wasn’t Nixon in a major accident?
Part of the answer is better internal padding. But that doesn’t take away from all the other answers.
Risk is relative. Is a presidential or monarch’s limo more likely to be in a front end collision? Or to have an assassination attempt?
It’s not like many heads of state get into their cars a little drunk to head to Kroger and buy some snacks. If everybody was driven by a professional driver in a well maintained car who was sober, trained, and at work, then what the risks of being in a car are would be very different.
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.
The Beast would likely not be a good car to be in, in the event of a crash, it’s just a trade-off, crash survivability is just not a design priority vs. surviving RPG, IEDs etc.
Something like a presidential limo will be escorted, so the chance of a crash is very low.
For an armored police car, usually the safety is built into the seat. They’ll have a 5 point harness and seat that are better at absorbing energy. To make sure they don’t get trapped inside, some vehicles have explosive bolts or quick releases inside.
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