Why Are Some Parts Of A Car Designed To Dent And Crumple?

Some people dread the moment that they hit a bump or are rear-ended, as even if they are safe and their car is fine, they dread the fact that they might have a dent to take to a car body shop.

Skilled mechanics can easily clear the dent, clean the car and leave it looking better than new thanks to their tooling and specialist knowledge, but one question that we are sometimes asked is why cars are designed to deform and dent in the first place.

Ironically, the reason why you get unsightly dents is to protect you from injury and to make repairs slightly easier by designing a vehicle around predictable deformation.

This is typically achieved through crumple zones, areas of the car’s bodywork that are intentionally designed to dent and deform in predictable ways following a collision or a crash.

The act of compressing and crumpling absorbs as much of the forces of an impact, which reduces the amount of force placed on the drivers and passengers inside, and allows for other more active safety features to work more effectively, as is often seen in crash test footage.

However, beyond protecting the driver, crumple zones also protect the structural integrity of the car more, meaning that it becomes increasingly possible to repair a car following an accident than it has been in the past.

This is a rather unintentional side effect, one that is generally seen with more minor impacts, but if the bodywork is designed to deform, it is typically easier for a skilled mechanic to repair that than to repair fundamental chassis damage that could cause a car to be written off entirely.

A crumple zone makes it more likely that the car can be repaired in the first place, and it is typically more affordable to repair a car than to replace it entirely.