General Motors (GM) is an American multinational automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. The company is most known for owning and manufacturing four automobile brands, Chevrolet, GMC, Cadillac and Buick. By sales, it was the largest automaker in the United States in 2022, and was the largest in the world for 77 years before losing the top spot to Toyota in 2008.
A hybrid-propellant rocket is a rocket with a rocket motor that uses rocket propellants in two different phases: one solid and the other either gas or liquid. The hybrid rocket concept can be traced back to the early 1930s.
A seat belt, also known as a safety belt or spelled seatbelt, is a vehicle safety device designed to secure the driver or a passenger of a vehicle against harmful movement that may result during a collision or a sudden stop. A seat belt reduces the likelihood of death or serious injury in a traffic collision by reducing the force of secondary impacts with interior strike hazards, by keeping occupants positioned correctly for maximum effectiveness of the airbag, and by preventing occupants being ejected from the vehicle in a crash or if the vehicle rolls over.
A hybrid vehicle is one that uses two or more distinct types of power, such as submarines that use diesel when surfaced and batteries when submerged. Other means to store energy include pressurized fluid in hydraulic hybrids.
A crash test dummy, or simply dummy, is a full-scale anthropomorphic test device (ATD) that simulates the dimensions, weight proportions and articulation of the human body during a traffic collision. Dummies are used by researchers, automobile and aircraft manufacturers to predict the injuries a person might sustain in a crash. Modern dummies are usually instrumented to record data such as velocity of impact, crushing force, bending, folding, or torque of the body, and deceleration rates during a collision.
Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile is a non-fiction book by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, first published in 1965. Its central theme is that car manufacturers resisted the introduction of safety features, and that they were generally reluctant to spend money on improving safety. The work contains substantial references and material from industry insiders. It was a best seller in non-fiction in 1966.
Automotive safety is the study and practice of automotive design, construction, equipment and regulation to minimize the occurrence and consequences of traffic collisions involving motor vehicles. Road traffic safety more broadly includes roadway design.
Lawrence Patrick may well be considered one of the fathers of the crash test dummy. Between 1960 and 1975, while a biomechanics professor at Detroit's Wayne State University, Patrick described his work by saying "I was a human crash-test dummy". Patrick allowed himself to be subject to over 400 rocket sled rides, crushing blows to the head and body, and other forms of physical abuse in an effort to develop a body of data on how the human body responded in a vehicle accident. One of his students, Harold Mertz, went on to develop Hybrid III, the current worldwide standard crash test dummy. Lawrence also subjected himself to a 50 pound pendulum to the breast plate to test the effects of a steering column on a human. Lawrence died of Parkinson's disease on April 30, 2006, at the age of 85.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is an agency of the U.S. federal government, part of the Department of Transportation, focused on transportation safety in the United States.
The Pontiac Montana is a minivan that was sold by General Motors under the Pontiac brand for model years 1997 to 2009. Its badge-engineered variants were the Chevrolet Venture and the Oldsmobile Silhouette in the first generation, and the Chevrolet Uplander, Saturn Relay, and Buick Terraza in the second generation. Prior to the 1997 model year, it was known as the Pontiac Trans Sport.
A HANS device is a type of head restraint and a safety device in motorsports. Head restraints are mandatory when competing with most major motorsports sanctioning bodies. They reduce the likelihood of head or neck injuries, including the often fatal basilar skull fracture, in the event of a crash. There are many such devices on the market today, but the HANS is the original and the most common.
Samuel W. Alderson was an American inventor best known for his development of the crash test dummy, a device that, during the last half of the twentieth century, was widely used by automobile manufacturers to test the reliability of automobile seat belts and other safety protocols.
The Steel And Foam Energy Reduction Barrier, sometimes generically referred to as a soft wall, is a technology found on oval automobile race tracks and high speed sections of road and street tracks, intended to absorb and reduce kinetic energy during the impact of a high speed crash, and thus, lessen injuries sustained to drivers and spectators. It was designed by a team of engineers at the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It was developed from 1998–2002, and first installed at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May 2002.
Stanford Robert Ovshinsky was an American engineer, scientist and inventor who over a span of fifty years was granted well over 400 patents, mostly in the areas of energy and information. Many of his inventions have had wide-ranging applications. Among the most prominent are: the nickel-metal hydride battery, which has been widely used in laptop computers, digital cameras, cell phones, and electric and hybrid cars; flexible thin-film solar energy laminates and panels; flat panel liquid crystal displays; rewritable CD and DVD discs; hydrogen fuel cells; and nonvolatile phase-change memory.
Energy Conversion Devices (ECD) was an American photovoltaics manufacturer of thin-film solar cells made of amorphous silicon used in flexible laminates and in building-integrated photovoltaics. The company was also a manufacturer of rechargeable batteries and other renewable energy related products. ECD was headquartered in Rochester Hills, Michigan.
Rochester Products Division (RPD) was a division of General Motors that manufactured carburetors, and related components including emissions control devices and cruise control systems in Rochester, New York. In 1995 Rochester became part of Delphi, which in turn became a separate company four years later, and continues to manufacture fuel injection systems in Rochester, now part of General Motors Automotive Components Holdings- Rochester Operations.
Hybrid vehicle drivetrains transmit power to the driving wheels for hybrid vehicles. A hybrid vehicle has multiple forms of motive power.
The patent encumbrance of large automotive NiMH batteries refers to allegations that corporate interests have used the patent system to prevent the commercialization of nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery technology. Nickel metal hydride battery technology was considered important to the development of battery electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) before the technology for lithium-ion battery packs became a viable replacement.
Humanetics is the largest manufacturer of anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs), commonly known as crash test dummies, as measured by market share. Headquartered in Farmington Hills, Michigan, the company is a subsidiary of Humanetics Group, itself owned by Bridgepoint Capital, a private equity firm.
DTS (Diversified Technical Systems) is an American manufacturer of miniature, high-shock rated, data acquisition systems and sensors for product and safety testing in extreme environments. DTS products, made in the U.S., are used in multiple industries including automotive, aerospace, military and defense, industrial, and sports and injury biomechanics. DTS was founded in 1990 by three crash test engineers: Mike Beckage, Steve Pruitt, and Tim Kippen. The company is headquartered in Seal Beach, California, with technical centers in Michigan, Europe, Japan, China, Korea, and Asia Pacific.