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Our cars have air bags, collapsible steering columns, safety glass, and other features to protect our heads. By comparison, cockpits are pretty dangerous.
All of those things are nice but the biggest problem in many cockpit designs (along with insufficient strength of seat anchorages and restraint attachment points) is the lack of longitudinal stiffness which predisposes to collapse of the cockpit. The best airbag or collapsible steering wheel in the world isn't going to do much if you wind up with a Lycoming in your lap because the firewall fails backward in an otherwise low speed survivable crash.