Overturn Countermeasures for Vehicles: History of the Rollbar

This book describes the century-long emergence and battle to protect drivers and occupants of off-road and on-road vehicles from crush-related injuries from rollovers. Deaths and serious injuries have been associated with vehicle overturns that involve tractors, other motorized machinery, automobiles, and small vehicles. It took more than a century to attend to much of this epidemic of death and disabling injury that resulted from these overturns. This book argues that a key factor in this response was epidemiology that reported rollover-related deaths and engineering revisionism that moved responses from “blame the victim” to rollbars to prevent the deaths.