What safety features did an early car have?
I will second the “None” answer. There was no such safety thinking in the design of early cars. Safety glass was first adopted by Ford in 1928. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield Today we are blessed with the safest cars ever made that will give you the best chance of surviving a crash. While one of the posters laments the lost days of cars with bodies that were easy to work on and full box frames, in an accident the body resists crumpling, so the car takes longer to de-accelerate. Which means YOU take longer to de-accelerate, so you impact into the non collapsing, non padded steering wheel with tremendous force. Usually you are impaled on the steering wheel. This is a fact since the romanticized of old were not equipped with a seat belt. Saab was the first to equip cars with seat belts as standard equipment in 1958. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea
Since cars were first made the features that made them safe for a long time were. (1) The chassis was made from solid box or u shaped thick steel. Connected to the front and back were spring steel bumper bars. The cars didn’t crumble like they do today. Most cars today don’t even have a chassis, just a pressed thin steel floor. I was a motor mechanic back in the fifties and you could weld the cars quite easily with gas bottles. Now they have to use Mig and Tig welders so they don’t blow holes through the metal because its so thin. The seats were big and deep piled an usually made of real leather. The steel in the car body was a lot thicker. Today they make them thin to cut down on costs and also to form better streamline curves to make the car attractive. I know we didn’t have seat belts back then and you could go through the windscreen. But I would rather do that than be crushed to death in an expensive good looking tin can of what they call a car today. The other thing that made them
