Yahoo Autos Google Patents a Sticky Car Hood to Keep You From Running Over Pedestrians
Front pedestrian impact safety plays a much larger role in modern automotive design than you might think. Automakers have altered front-end design, developed hoods that rise up on impact, and even fitted external airbags all in an effort to protect pedestrians who might get hit. Potential automaker Google has its own take on how to protect pedestrians-and it's ingeniously bizarre.
Google was granted a patent on Tuesday for a car hood with a sticky surface to trap pedestrians hit from the front. It uses a layer of adhesive under a coating that's designed to break on impact. In other words, Google wants to turn your hood into a moving sticky mouse trap.
When a pedestrian is hit by a car, they're usually knocked to the ground and hit a second time, which is where the most harmful injuries occur. By essentially sticking the hit pedestrian to the car, the chances of that secondary impact are significantly reduced. As you'd expect, Google has designed this with self-driving cars in mind.
The ultimate goal of a self-driving car is to eliminate injurious incidents entirely. But of course, as the technology is refined, you can't prevent 100-percent of potential crashes. Google imagines this as a stop-gap solution until its self-driving cars become totally infallible.
And there's a bit of humor in this particular solution for pedestrian safety. It'd certainly make hit-and-runs more difficult.
Google doesn't say how the hit pedestrian will get, uh, unstuck from the car after the accident, or what effect the adhesive might have on their clothes or skin.
As with any patent, there's no guarantee this will see the light of day, and a Google representative told Mercury News as much. Still, it's one of the more interesting solutions we've seen for keeping pedestrians safe.
