Text description - Braking Distance video

VISION: A car driving at 65 km/h and a car at car driving at 60 km/h; Lily driving looks up shocked, Crash..

NARRATOR: Only 5k's over, what difference could it make? You never know what other drivers might do...

VISION: MUARC sign, David Logan walks past

David Logan: We’re at the Monash University accident research centre in Melbourne. This is the driver simulator we have a full 180 degree view including some rear views as well.

VISION: David Logan, Road Safety Engineer, MUARC

David Logan SYNC : The simulator studies in particular are quite interesting from an engineering point of view because what we’re looking at are the human factors around driving, we’re trying to think about why people do what they do.

VISION: Simulator screen views of car driving with hazards appearing.

David Logan: We look at the difference between 65 kilometres an hour and 60 kilometres an hour. It's quite common for people to think that just a small amount of speeding over the speed limit is not significant.

VISION: Lily drives car being tested by David Logan and stopping distances are being measured.

David Logan: I think people don’t understand the maths inherently, we don’t necessarily feel the maths, I suppose you can put it and I think most people underestimate the importance of speed and how much small increases in speed can make a big difference in stopping distance.

VISION: Graphic of speed/distance showing that at 50 km/h you the car stops 35 m, at 55 km/h it stops at 40m, at 60 km/h it stops at 45m. At 65 km/h and 70 km/h it would hit an object at 45 m.

David Logan: and just by the use of simple mathematical equations we demonstrated that the significance of a 5 kilometre an hour difference in initial speed

VISION: car comes to a halt

David Logan: translated to 27 kilometre an hour difference in the final impact speed because of the way the maths works

VISION: David Logan in MUARC simulator; graphs of equations.

It is fairly simple maths, the equation is simply V squared equals U squared plus 2ax. 
V squared represents the square of the final speed. Now for the purposes of stopping distance we usually just let that equal zero because we are assuming that we want the car to stop. So we end up with U squared plus 2ax equals zero and by rearranging that we end up with the equation d is equal to U squared divided by 2a.

VISION: graphs of equations. V = U squared + 2ax. Graphs for initial speeds of 60 km/h and 65 km/h are shown.

So what that means is that the stopping distance is proportional to the square of the initial speed.

VISION: car driving; stopping distances measured.

For a doubling in initial speed the stopping distance will increase by a factor of four. For a tripling in an initial speed say from 20 kilometres an hour to 60 kilometres an hour the stopping distance will increase by a factor of nine . So that’s where the maths is showing us how important initial speed is for stopping distance

VISION: David Logan in MUARC simulator.

The thing that people should remember is most of the stopping is done in the last few metres because you're still taking off speed at the same rate but you're doing it from a much smaller base so you’ve already taken off a lot of speed, those last few kilometres an hour drop away quite quickly

VISION: CRASH LAB footage showing impacts at 100 km/h and 60 km/h.

By having a lower speed, initially you’ll be able to get into the lower part of the curve more quickly as well and therefore wash off the speed that’s required.

VISION: Jacqui Lewis,Safety Design engineer ; GMH animation

At Holden we’re about to introduce forward collision alert which is designed to alert a driver when they’re travelling too close to the vehicle in front using a math algorithm behind all of that

VISION: GMH animation; Jacqui Lewis:Safety Design engineer.

Jacqui Lewis: Maths and physics, are the building blocks to determine when we need to help our drivers
for safe stopping distances

VISION: Lily driving

Generally people don’t drive as though they're waiting for something to happen. Often people are thinking about other things... and every second that time increases at 60 kilometres an hour you travel another 15 or 16 metres down the road and that could mean the difference between stopping in time and not stopping in time

VISION: Lily driving; crash; Car wheel comes to a halt.

NARRATOR: Three seconds could save a person's life. So whatever speed you're doing - do the maths.