Post Wed Nov 11, 2015 1:50 pm

Two-Component Safety Calculation

I'm guessing Der Bayer's answer from last year will still apply (apologies - I have not watched the video), but I was thinking about the dynamics of accidents and it gave me a bit of an idea.

A car has two objectives to accomplish in a collision:
  1. It has to maintain the integrity of the passenger compartment. (It doesn't matter how good your airbags are if the front seats are wrapped around the tree.)
  2. It has to protect the passengers within the passenger compartment. (It doesn't matter how solid the passenger compartment is if the driver is impaled on the steering column.)
What this would mean from a game perspective is: the better your Safety quality, chassis, and body, the better your car will perform on objective 1 in any accident (because you are reinforcing the passenger compartment and reinforcing/refining the crumple zones), and the better your safety technology and the better your interior options and quality, the better your car will perform on objective 2 (because the passengers will be better restrained within the cabin and be able to survive sharper deceleration events), but the final safety stat is going to be a weighted average of the two that favors whichever one is worse (e.g. a harmonic mean).

I think this would make optimizing for safety a more interesting and realistic process:
  • While better safety tech would still be a big help to making crashworthy city cars, the quality sliders would be a lot more important.
  • While size would still be a big help to crashworthiness of large vehicles, a minimum level of safety technology would still be required to meet standards.
It might also help players to add more realistic amounts of weight to their cars in the pursuit of safety (as -15 Advanced would no longer be an effective option in most cases).