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Person

Béla Barényi

A man wearing glasses and a suit jacket over a button-up shirt stands against a dark background, looking directly at the camera.

Austro-Hungarian engineer (1907–1997) who spent his career at Mercedes-Benz quietly inventing most of the survivable car. His 1952 patent for a passenger cell with deformable front and rear sections — what we now call crumple zones — inverted a century of automotive engineering, which had treated rigidity as a virtue. He is credited with more than 2,500 patents and was inducted into the Detroit Automotive Hall of Fame in 1994.

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