Top 10 Safety Systems

6. Deformable Structure
Imagine a driver runs a stoplight directly into your path. It's not a bad crash, except that your hood detaches and slices back through the passenger compartment like a guillotine. Or the steering column spears through your chest. Before engineers focused on making cars crashworthy, such bloody occurrences were common. Today, deformable structure absorbs the energy of a crash without transmitting it to the occupants. Included in this category is laminated safety glass, perhaps the first automotive safety system.

5. Airbags
Some estimates say airbags save 12,000 lives every year. They prevent you from smashing into steering wheels, A-pillars and other hard objects. Airbags also help stop basal skull fractures of the type that killed Dale Earnhardt. Current or "Second-Generation" airbags are "depowered" to cause less injury upon activation while still providing enough cushioning upon impact to reduce fatalities.

4. Limited-Access, Divided Highways
Dwight Eisenhower did more for traffic safety in the U.S. than any other single person. Motivated partially by the German autobahn system he experienced after World War II, Ike was a prime motivator for the Interstate highway system. When evaluated by miles driven, there are about 70 percent fewer fatalities on Interstates as on other roads. Nostalgia for the two-lane Route 66 escapes us when we remember either being stuck behind slow-moving, stinky trucks or scared witless when Dad was passing a long line of cars.

3. Stability Control
Computer-assisted Electronic Stability Control (ESC) is better than having racing greats Jeff Gordon or Michael Schumacher take the wheel in an emergency. That's because you don't have to feed their giant egos the rest of the time. Stability control (called ESC, DSC, ESP, VSC, VSA, AdvanceTrac, Stabilitrak and other names) requires no driver action. That's good: In an emergency most drivers fail to do the right thing. Diplomatic immunity from the laws of physics, ESC is not. Ice, deep water, an under-inflated or worn tire, or entering a tight turn too fast will still result in a wreck. (Some imprecisely call ESC "anti-rollover" technology. The only way ESC can prevent a rollover is to keep the vehicle on the pavement. That's okay: Almost all rollovers are caused by running off the road or hitting something like a curb.)

2. Seatbelts
If you're not firmly affixed to the vehicle, nothing—not a NASCAR car or an Abrams M1A2 tank—will protect you in a crash. The government says seatbelts save about 15,000 lives a year. In recent years, the venerable seatbelt has enjoyed some timely updates. Pretensioners—some of which employ firework-like pyrotechnic charges—cinch the belts racecar-tight the instant the car's computer senses a crash. Load limiters—some built into the belts' webbing and stitching—soften the force. Still, some 7,000 people will die this year because they weren't wearing seatbelts. Again, buckle up.