Crash Survivable Design For Micro Cars

Micro cars designed to get great gas milage have the downside of having very bad survivability in a crash with a standard size vehicle, not having any crumple zones to absorb the impact. A little scooter size car colliding with a big rig would end up being scraped off the bumper. With this design however even such a mismatch might be survivable in a collision.

The car is designed to slide under the other full sized vehicle, picture a limpet with wheels, strengthened to become a ramp rather than a battering ram. The re-enforcement needed to prevent a car from being crushed as another car rolls over it, while substantial, is nothing near what you'd need to absorb the impact of a head to head collision.

This takes the disadvantage of the car being very small and turns it into an advantage. Make it as low to the ground as possible and use masts with flags or other means to make it visible to taller vehicles, something already done with recumbent bikes.

This design approach would be better for the large car in the collision as well. While it's not great hitting a 3 foot ramp head on at sixty miles per hour and getting tossed into the air of flipping over, it's a heck of a lot better than having 2,000 pounds (about the weight of a Smart Car) plowing into your passenger compartment at a combined speed of 120 miles per hour.