Mercedes has a system on the S-class that uses the sensors to detect a potential impact (e.g. an rapidly approaching vehicle while the car is stationary) and uses the active suspension to "jump" raising the car a few inches just at the moment of impact, apparently slightly reducing the potential for injury.
Many cars and especially planes & spaceships are have tons of systems like this.
I worked on a system that did things like in response to a primary datasource being offline would switch the queries it used to a different database to include substitute data and pass this back to be used instead until the primary store came back online. Three years after it was put in production this happened on one of the company's biggest and most important days of the year, and our SREs were sitting there calmly trying to solve the issue, ended up waiting until late at night to deploy a fix. It would have been reasonable for this service to just rely on the primary source, but we would have been offline for hours if this little trick hadn't been put in place.
>...a different database to include substitute data and pass this back to be used instead
The thing that trips me up about this is how can you ensure that the substitute data is actually useful. Is the substitute data a copy of the primary data? I guess it all depends on the use case...
Haha, maybe not? Since their car would tend to go underneath, although the footage I've seen always shows the other vehicle hitting from the side with the hood sliding slightly beneath the Mercedes...it does seem from watching that would give other vehicle slightly more space to dissipate the impact energy.
Now if they had only bought a Mercedes as well, they could have chosen the self-breaking option to avoid the collision in the first place.
One that I've always thought is really cool since I heard about it is the base of street signs. Instead of being cemented into the ground, signs are commonly bolted to a base so that they'll break away when hit. Some even have an incline that will throw the sign up and over your car. After learning this, I've started paying attention to signs I pass on walks or while driving and it's crazy how they are everywhere and I never noticed.
Another thing to look into if you find that cool is guard rail design. Modern guard rails have some cool features designed to reduce risks associated with hitting them.
Nortel DMS-10 telephony switch springs to mind. They run in landline phone company switching offices amd date back to the early 1970s. Those things are indestructible in the face of all kinds of disasters.
