Recently "safety" has become the subject of worldwide discussions. With the single word safety, however, various features and functions of the vehicle are described.

The purpose of this discussion is to try to separate the confused definitions and to classify the main problems under clear definitions like ACTIVE and PASSIVE SAFETY.

A few examples show what Daimler-Benz understands by the word SAFETY and how the company tries to solve the problems with the final aim to design for safety.

It seems necessary to make the safety features measurable, i.e. to express them in numbers and to specify minimum values through regulations based on practical experiments. This fact is connected with a fundamental change of the vehicle body engineering. The former, more or less empirical method of developing passenger car bodies will be replaced by methods originating from basic and functional consideration. Through these observations aerodynamics and safety become the primary factors in development programs and this new classification of our tasks is at the same time the beginning of a new period in the development of vehicle body engineering.