Definitely worth watching the video. Even though the results not surprising, it is still amazing to see how well the interior space around the 2009 driver stays intact. And how much the space around the 1959 drive does not.
From the article:
> According to safety engineers at the scene, the driver of the 2009 Chevrolet Malibu would likely have suffered slight knee injury. The driver of the 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air would have died instantly.
I completed a clinical rotation at a suburban hospital emergency department built in the boom of the 1950s. There was an apocryphal story circulating at the time about how things used to be, given the department was undergoing planning for replacement in the next half-decade.
In earlier years, there used to be 3 neurosurgeons kept on staff. Once seatbelt laws came into effect in the 1970s, that number went down to 1.
Friend of mine's mom was an ICE nurse at Good Samaritans Hospital. She said patient load dropped a lot once they put in the barriers on hwy 17. And dropped some more when the helmet laws came into effect.
Every time I drive on highway 17 I always notice how many black bumper swipe marks are on the median barriers. I think: every single one of those marks prevented someone from heading straight into the oncoming traffic lanes!
I would guess there is some kind of normal distribution, it’s not like people dies or were fine, there were lots somewhere inbetween that took healthcare to save. The safety measures save people from dying, but also save the people who would have been only mostly dead.
Same friend was in a motorcycle accident where he hit his head on something so hard he broke his helmet. Had a mild concussion. Only other real injury was he broke a bone in his hand.
One of the only two times I have seen a flaming car wreck was on highway 17. Not sure what happened, but that car was completely engulfed in flames when I passed by at night.
They have not always existed and seatbelts alone were not enough to protect the head, especially on 70's/80's cars were the direction column would often be pushed straight in the direction of the driver when the cars smashed something.
Even the motorcycle helmet laws didn’t start to to into effect until the 80s/90s. that was about when airbags started getting added to cars so they were roughly parallel efforts along slightly different lines.
Essentially the car becomes the helmet and does a more complete job on the whole body than just the helmet on the motorcyclist.
> Once seatbelt laws came into effect in the 1970s, that number went down to 1.
I'm surprised the number went down, I'd have thought there would be far more car crash survivors with traumatic brain injuries once people stopped being killed outright so often.
Without imaging technologies that are taken for granted for granted today, I think the role of the neurosurgeon was essentially to drill burr holes for suspected hemorrhages.
Saw a video of a main thoroughfare in Lansing, MI filmed in the early sixties. It was a test for a camera shop I think. It was neat watching pristine versions of cars I remember from my youth.
Then they captured a crash between two vehicles at about 35 mph. Today both parties would get out and exchange insurance companies. However this was not the case. Two ambulances hauled away the drivers and the narrator of the film said one did not make it. Indeed we have come a long way in car safety in the past sixty years.
Probably about where we are with pedestrian/cyclist safety.
In NA, lack of safety regulations is resulting in massively increased ride and hood heights, which is going to kill a lot of people over the coming years.
Not sure why the downvotes, just look at discussions here on HN about cyclists/escotters drivers wearing helmets. Cant find the link on phone now but it was pretty eye opening.
People fighting tooth and nails that without helmets they ride safer (what?), they have more situational awareness (more what? we talk about cyclists helmets) and various other arguments that make 0 sense to me, just emotional swings of people rejecting being told what to do by default.
My 2 cents - I didnt wear helmet on bike during youth since nobody did. But when I bought my new xc bike in 2008 I bought a helmet with it. Within a month I had accident due to screwup of my GF back then, where I hit the ground face down hard, losing few seconds of my memory. There was spiky stone in the ground where my forehead hit full force. I would be dead for a long time now if I didnt wear that helmet. No accident before or after, but you only need that 1 moment, same with safety belts.
Usually the argument I have heard against them is the second order effects.
In any individual incident, a helmet would make things better. However, a helmet is a very bulky thing, most bikes lack a secure storage, and people just don’t want to carry around a big helmet when they go shopping, or to a restaurant, or any other activities. So if you mandate it, biking rates will go down, and cyclists become so uncommon on roads that drivers stop being familiar with how to drive around them, stop looking out for cyclists that are almost never there, etc.
There’a also some evidence that drivers will adjust their behavior based on perceived cyclist protection and skill level; the behavior around a person in a hat and sundress is different than someone in full Lycra with helmet.
Whiplash is also popular for insurance/disability fraud. There was an interesting story on HN a while back about how the prevalence of whiplash after accidents in the US is far higher than in Europe, for no other easily explainable reason, but I can't find the link now.
My mom rear ended a teenager at low spveeds. The teenager was fine with no neck issues, but after talking with their parents suddenly had whiplash.
She told the insurance company that the claim was probably fraudulent, and their response was "most whiplash claims are probably fraudulent, but it's cheaper to settle"
My wife was rear ended mildly by a truck years ago, and was initially ok other than the shock. Headaches and dizziness started after the next day and, including recovery with physiotherapy, lasted around 3 months.
That stuff is not a joke.
(more lighthearted note: after 3 months, her symptoms were mostly gone except for a new and intermittent nausea. The therapist was confounded for a few days, until he suggested the cause of that might be more related to me than the truck driver)
Interesting -- to my naive mind headaches and dizziness sound more like a brain problem (concussion) than a neck problem (whiplash). So, if you don't mind sharing, I'm curious what the actual underlying problem was and how the physiotherapy solved it.
I had a quick google but the only paper I found that proposed some mechanism ("vertebrobasilar artery insufficiency (VBI) leads to brainstem and cerebellar ischemia and infarction following cervical manipulation", i.e. bashing the neck might mess up blood flow to the brain somehow, causing bits of it to die off) looks complete bullshit.
I remember watching Jacques Villeneuve crash pretty hard in the 2000 Australian Gran Prix (tragically a loose wheel stuck and killed a marshal). I read an interview with him later, he said he ran back to the pits after the crash, but he couldn't even walk the next day. Adrenalin does funny things.
I dropped a motorcycle at the track a little over a year ago, and bounced off the tire wall in the process. Had a few bumps and bruises, but felt fine, until my back freaked out a month later. I got it sorted without too much trouble, but whiplash injuries do funny things.
Having been in a couple significant (totaled vehicles) rear end accidents, neck pain does tend to show up a little bit after the accident.
I’ve never had it seriously enough that I’ve needed treatment, but I have had a minor kink in my neck that shows up later in the day. The kind of pain where it’s sore when you turn you head one very specific direction.
Do you really think a teenager who was involved in possibly their first accident is really going to make an honest assessment of themselves? Although they make not be in shock, the sudden hit of adrenaline you get at that time can really does not make you capable of a self assessment.
Also in my last accident, it tooks months for the symptoms to become evident. When an EMT or doctor checks you out after an accident they are checking for life threatening injuries. Not saying "OK, despite the accident you are 100% the same! Go about life as normal!"
I don't believe that it's just fraud: the claims aspect adds drama and the drama makes it objectively worse.
I'm going through wiplash myself right now (mostly gone) and I think that too much drama played a major role. In my case not because of any claims situation, but because
having recently gone through an intracranial hemorrhage and because of having spent a year of my early career typing out neurosurgery reports from dictaphone. The result was that I wasn't sufficiently confident that it might be "just whiplash". Went on for months, with hardly any improvement, until a physiotherapist gave me a demonstration of just how capable those muscles are of creating the nastiest headaches. I'm quite convinced that this change to my mind was more important than the changed my neck muscles. I'd expect the drama created by the claims situation too have a similar effect as that alleviated hypochondrism I had, creating a link from claims to severity that isn't related to fraud at all. Fraud certainly exists, but its role might be much smaller that suggested by that link.
I remember that story from HN as well by the way, might actually have been a contributing factor in my disbelief/hypochondrism: "this pain is real, certainly not that thing that hardly exists outside of the American claims ecosystem". Beware of unexpected side-effects I guess.
(another factor in the difference USA vs rest of the world, entirely unrelated to claims, is likely the "unique" relationship with painkillers. Tho put it in perspective: I lost two trips to France to that injury that I had been looking forward to for months, but didn't take a single pill in the entire ordeal)
Sometimes the muscles are compensating for a new instability in the spine from the trauma, which can be seen, but only with a motion x-ray.
I had a motion x-ray done of my neck that finally demonstrated that my skull slips slightly side-to-side relative to my atlas (C1 vertebra). So what seemed like my muscles overreacting or just me complaining about psychogenic neck pain (or trying to scam the insurance company) was actually my muscular system making sure I don't suffer an internal decapitation.
If anyone's having trouble with the insurance company insisting nothing is wrong because the static x-rays look fine, I cannot recommend highly enough that you look into a motion x-ray. It's very possible that your spine is only fine when it isn't moving, and that's no way to live your life.
I find that hard to believe, a friend of mine in Ireland touched a taxi at no more than 5mph, leaving no obvious damage on the taxi itself, but with the taxi driver rolling on the road and getting an ambulance to hospital. There's big time insurance fraud going on there apparently.
Traffic lights often result in rear-ends (they commonly increase after red light cam installation, though are still safer than the t-bones red light cameras reduce.) Roundabouts, which are more common in Europe, cause these much less, and since you have to slow down to enter one any sort of crashes in one tend to be at slower speeds.
Isn't this a case of survivorship bias, like when they took a statistical view of all the areas where WWII airplanes got hit by bullets and they wanted to increase the armour, but a statistician told them to armour the parts where no bullets had hit... because they only surveyed planes that came back whole and the ones that didn't come back had likely been hit in parts of the plane they didn't add to the survey.
No, survivorship bias would be looking at motorcycle injuries by only talking to motorcycle injury survivors. Your conclusion would be that motorcycle injuries only result in minor small damage like skin abrasion, broken fingers, etc. Your conclusion would be that brain injuries basically never happen because all the survivors you spoke to were fine.
If you're looking at casualties from motorcycle incidents, you by definition are not looking at survivors.
The real issue is that flying cars need a lot more energy since they need to stay up in the air as well as move forwards, and the oil crisis quickly put an end to that kind of per-person energy consumption being realistic.
I don't think we'll ever get flying cars the way people imagine them.
To stay in the air, you either need to push a lot of air down (like a helicopter or drone), or have wings and push a lot of air backwards (like an airplane).
The former allows you to hover, but is incredibly loud. The latter allows gliding, but requires a runway for takeoff/landing, not to mention a lot of lateral space for wings.
Unless we have a breakthrough discovery and find a way to create lift without requiring either speed or moving a ton of air, the sci-fi visions of flying cars will remain fiction.
there's also the issue of "chunks of metal above people's heads can drop out of the sky". Imagine flying car accidents being about as common as car accidents today. That would be untenable.
A big thank you as well to all the consumer advocates, and the politicians and regulators who listened to them, for imposing safety requirements that car companies claimed would be cost prohibitive and hurt the economy.
Odd then that the insurance companies haven't been on the front lines against sugar, air and water pollution, climate change, meat consumption, etc etc. But good to know their greed-driven self-interests are closely aligned with individuals.
It does, just not by much if you look at individual cases. But insurance companies don't look at individual cases, they aggregate risk. And if millions of people buy carbon neutral HVAC systems, it will definitely decrease aggregate insurance liability for hurricanes.
The flaw in your original argument, and the reason we don't generally see insurance companies on the front lines lobbying for positive changes for consumers, is that they have the option of simply raising their prices in response to the risk landscape, rather than trying to change the landscape itself. This is why free markets, as useful as they are in many contexts, can't be relied on by themselves to provide a healthy, stable society.
There's not any single insurance group large enough where the aggregate risk of climate change is even remotely within the possibility of affecting change.
The IIHS represents the interests of 94 percent of vehicle insurance policies on US roads. So, almost all of the cars on the road are under underwritten by policies of IIHS members. Any change they affect has a direct impact on their bottom line.
There are a few property insurance trade associations in the US, and I don't think any of them have quite as high of a membership representation as the IIHS does for auto insurers, but let's for the sake of argument, say that there's an association that represents a full 100% of homeowner and commercial property insurance policies.
If that existed, they would have influence over 13% of US emissions, or ~778 million metric tons of CO2. But, while insurance law does stay within a country's borders, CO2 doesn't. Global emissions are 35 billion metric tons. So this hypothetical super powerful trade group would have influence over 2% of the total. If they could impose an (extremely expensive) requirement of a 20% reduction across all of their policyholders, this would have a 0.4% reduction of the global CO2 emissions.
Basically, assuming the most powerful trade organization possible, it would have no real effect.
International cooperation is required to fix this particular problem, and insurance just isn't an international-scale thing. Treatises are going to be the only way to fix it.
So, I guess we shouldn't thank them so much. Climate change was only one of the many items the insurance industry isn't helping much with. Which is my point. And I don't think they were particularly instrumental in getting the automotive safety ball rolling, either, though I'm sure they were happy to join in once it was.
For sure, it is a happenstance of aligned incentives that make the IIHS relevant.
That’s being said, they were a significant proponent that accelerated most of the safety improvements in North American vehicles since the mid 90s when they started doing overlap crash testing.
Before that, governments were mostly complacent with full-frontal crash testing, which simply wasn’t realistic enough.
Most of the major changes in North American vehicle safety has been due to their efforts.
Now, they’re not altruistic, they’re just asshole insurance companies with the right incentives.
At least you'll go out in style. Seriously though, it would be great see the older car styles brought back with modern safety standards or older cars in some way upgraded to modern safety standards.
Not possible sadly. A lot of the appealing features on older cars (thin pillars, tall windows) are incompatible with current safety standards. Part of the reason why new cars tend to look clunky.
I get why thin pillars don't work with modern safety standards, but surely tall windows are fine? There's plenty modern cars with fairly tall windows, like the renault kangoo?
I'm not having success finding the requirements, but I am almost certain there are requirements on window size. Purely by logic, as the window size increases, side impact rating will decrease.
It's not the tall windows themselves that are dangerous, it's the accompanying low door sills. Higher door sills mean more of your body is protected by metal instead of glass.
Safety stands dictate what happens if you collide with a pedestrian. These days, ever car has a sloped front-end. It's not just for aerodynamics, but it's designed to push pedestrians up and onto the hood, whereas the old "stylish" cars had completely flat front-ends, which made it like getting hit by a wall.
Even worse, some older cars had a front end that had negative slopes. If they hit a pedestrian, they'd be pushed down and under the car.
airbag is overrated as long as you wear a seatbelt. if it had had an airbag, it's likely to kill you either with phosphorus (early 90s) or metal shrapnel (late 90s to current)
There were some cars with crumple zones back then, but you very likely do not have a crumple zone capable of protecting you. No matter how long your bonnet, you will probably take the brunt of the impact with your body in a car from the 70s.
Not saying don't drive it, I drive a 90s car with no airbags as a daily so I am only marginally better off.
What ever other car hit will so. In such an accident, the combined crumble zone is halved so. If you a concrete wall, good luck so.
I know what would happen if I have a serious accident in my week-end hobby car so. A likely hood that is significantly reduced by current fuel prices. And a serious maintenance backlog...
So the alcohol is part of the story but far from the end of it. Alcohol related accidents only made up about 1/3 of the deadly accidents in the US [0]. The NHTSA identifies a few different causes of car accidents including distracted driving and drug or alcohol related accidents [1]. Also noteworthy is that Marijuana seems to cause the same issues as alcohol although the studies are a little less detailed[2]. I couldn't find long term studies on the topic but I suspect that distracted driving has gone up in the past few years since smart phones have become more popular. Distracted drivers killed about 3,000 people in 2020 [3].
What's interesting is that insurance companies seem to measure bad driving using a few different metrics including deaths per miles traveled [5]. Single vehicle crashes were also very dangerous in the rural states like Wyoming (deer are a serious problem), but for some reason Rhode Island tied with Montana at 70% of all accidents being single vehicle accidents[6].
I also couldn't find an annual figure for people disabled in car accidents, but a 2004 study found that about 1.2 million Americans live with permanent injuries from car accidents and about 41% of them are unable to work [6].
The 59 GM Full Sizes with an X frame did perform particularly poorly in overlap crashes - it would have performed better with a full head on - or a earlier/later one with a full permitter frame. Nevermind the virtual indestructible nearly contemporary unibody mopars and fords (59 or 60 for mopar, and 61 for lincolns - the lincoln continentals were banned from demolition derby for a reason).
While a full permitter frame (or early unibodies) does not negate the benefits of crumple zones - they absorb the impact of the crash, shielding the occupants from the forces of the impact - the X-Body GM Full Size does still perform exceptionally poorly.
I don't think anyone car argue that modern cars don't perform several orders of magnitude better in severe crashes - however for light crashes, your hunk of 50's-70's metal will often end up with significantly less damage, and at a minimum can be driven home.
> however for light crashes, your hunk of 50's-70's metal will often end up with significantly less damage
I don't get your point - yes they have less damage, because they're not soaking up the energy. That's like saying "a motorcycle helmet made of solid steel won't damage as easily as a modern one". Sure, but that's exactly the point of a modern helmet
I think the point is that, practically speaking, there is no such thing as a "fender-bender" with modern cars. Even very low-speed collisions typically involve lots of plastic going "crunch". Instead of your fender being a little bent, you now have dozens of pieces of plastic paneling that have to be replaced.
Between cars, no. But a pretty significant amount of the traffic in my area is actually just trucks and full-size SUVs. Twice I've had someone hit the hitch receiver on my truck and damage their vehicle without any damage to my vehicle.
It's interesting to think that if you found yourself in a '59 and looking like you were going to hit an oncoming car, that the best chance you had was to turn in towards them!
Also, i'm wondering if there is any equivalent of the dieselgate scandal for crash testing - given the tests are controlled and repeatable, is there any suggestion that optimising to ace the tests creates any compromises in other areas which mean that overall injuries are more serious than otherwise would occur?
Yes, of course, the industry designs vehicles specifically to pass the tests.
But the tests themselves are very comprehensive, both in the US and in the EU. It's like having 100% code coverage in your unit/integration/regression tests, and then doing test-driven development.
GM and Ford vehicles were deathtraps until the mid 2000's when Ford bought Volvo and borrowed several of its platforms for their own vehicles. Ford literally cheaped out on the steel used in the roof pillars of their SUVs and pickup trucks, for example - deciding that the cost of lower-strength steel was worth the additional profit and they'd eat the cost of any potential lawsuits/settlements.
Honda and Toyota, similarly, were death-trap cars until around the same time, because a)the Japanese have a much lower crash rate and travel far less on high-speed roadways so it wasn't a domestic issue, and b)they had to compete against Ford in the US market (and GM, who had to compete against Ford.) In the EU, Euro-NCAP crash standards were forcing safety improvement among the non-luxury brands Honda and Toyota were mostly competing against (and GM/Ford brands/models sold in the EU, too.)
> I don't think anyone car argue that modern cars don't perform several orders of magnitude better in severe crashes - however for light crashes, your hunk of 50's-70's metal will often end up with significantly less damage, and at a minimum can be driven home.
Performance isn't judged based on damage level and "severe" versus "light" are completely arbitrary standards you picked aka "wiggle words."
Less damage to the car in any crash means more acceleration on you. Human body repair bills, especially in the US, cost significantly more than body damage to cars. Unfortunately, due to the sad state of US healthcare - getting to the ER and the first hours of medical care could cost more than the value of one's car, easily.
Given car crashes are a significant cause of injury and death in the US - and that modern cars are significantly less polluting (multiple orders of magnitude so) and more fuel efficient, quieter, more ergonomic and comfortable - I'll take a modern car, thanks. Side benefit: modern sedans and european SUVs are also significantly safer for pedestrians.
This is ultimately why minor fender benders have become so expensive with new cars. They are designed to be destroyed. Having a huge solid chrome bumper seems safer. But it actually just transfers the energy of a crash directly to your body.
Is it not also possible that car parts have become a giant ripoff? Surely if you bought a $30k car by parts you would be paying like $50-100k, even for late model cars still in production.
Why would you consider that a ripoff? Do you not understanding that things like warehousing cost a LOT of money, especially given that the actual demand for spares will be more or less random.
$50-100k seems cheap when you compare the cost and space required to store a complete car (can store it outdoors even!) vs a fully dissasembled vehicle with all the shelving, bins, packaging, and inventory system for someone to pick specific parts for those who need it.
I guess it's a bit of both - I'm sure car manufacturers have realised that they they can lower the sticker price by bumping up the margins on aftermarket
It's alluded to briefly in other comments, but one of the biggest problems in our country is the fact that our built environment was completely reconfigured for the automobile - and not simply due to "demand."
Since the 1960's there have been tremendous advances in safety for people INSIDE of automobiles, but the safety of people outside of automobiles continues to be largely ignored.
There is a kind of arms race underway toward larger and heavier vehicles, which are far more deadly than small cars.
We have inherited so many tragedies from our grandparents' generation - the dominance of the car is on spar with nuclear weapons in the threat it poses to humanity.
The automotive industry has put a ton of work into pedestrian safety with frontal impacts.
The car is required in a developing country like the US. There is so much space between things still.
Our grandparents wanted to get to work and travel. Hard to blame them.
Also, so far, MAD has greatly reduced the number of big wars. It's hard to predict the future, but nuclear weapons so far have provided a lot of peace.
Idk... It's part of the culture in the US and seems to be getting worse lately.
As an example, I love the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, but after the pandemic they instituted this policy that pedestrians were no longer allowed to walk on the 3 Mile Drive. This is a service-type road throughout a park that people routinely walked on for decades. Not in a minor way either: it's a major pathway through the park that the park is designed around in many ways. It's difficult to not walk on the drive.
People also like to drive on it to look at the landscaping, and use it to get to locations in the arboretum. It really seemed to me that some wealthy benefactor complained to the arboretum about pedestrians as they were driving around, and the park in the process banned the pedestrians. In the process they immediately made the place much more pedestrian hostile.
It's difficult to describe how absurd this is if you haven't been there, given the layout and history. They also used to routinely have fundraiser 5ks on it and no longer do, etc.
It's like they're literally moving to prioritize cars in the landscape in a park for landscaping.
This is after also limiting the density of visitors as well by requiring reservations.
Anyway, this is a place I love and I am really disappointed in in the last couple of years (I could go on about a couple of other things). It's partially a personal rant, but it's also to me a very good example of how cultural norms in the US are very car-centric and that trend seems to be increasing lately.
That car is not inherently required. It's required because US cities are designed around cars.
There's a great channel called "Not just bikes" that demonstrates what cities look like that don't follow this pattern. Denser buildings, narrower and fewer lanes, less space wasted on parking, better pedestrian crossings and islands, better signaling/timing for pedestrians, etc.
Those cities have lower noise, lower pollution, better economics (road maintenance is a massive cost) and are way safer.
Everyone on HN keeps saying cities. Cities this, cities that. Sure, maybe it's an ideal from an efficiency standpoint. But guess what, a lot of people in the US don't live in cities. Most of the country consists of space that is not cities. Most of the people I know live in these places, all across the country.
I have read that current hood designs are effectively required for pedestrian safety, so the "old-timer" look will not come back. Which would speak against "the safety of people outside of automobiles continues to be largely ignored."
I had a friend some years ago who wrote survival advice. Not just SHTF stuff, but how to best survive everyday life situations.
He had some car advice:
> Forget "crumple zones". You want to be in the biggest, heaviest car. That's the one that will win the collision. It will often be an older car.
In this case, the '09 Malibu and the '59 Bel Air are almost exactly the same weight (about 3500 pounds), so you might think it would be an even draw. Or counting the fact that the Bel Air is almost 20 inches longer, it should win!
I have a feeling that my friend would have felt much safer in the Bel Air.
Sometimes I wonder if people just write this kind of stuff to troll people. My wife was looking for ways to repel wasps over an outdoor dinner, and she found one saying to use lemon juice. We were like, “I’m pretty sure wasps would love some of that, not be repelled by it.”
There is a bit of truth in your friends thoughts - when cars are crash tested it's using their own kinetic energy, so a bigger heavier car must be proportionally stronger to resist the crash forces, and get the same rating. So all things being equal, a big heavy car with the same crash occupancy rating as a small light car will be better to be in in crashes which involve another car.
Yeah, it's true and I hate it. It has created an arms race for bigger and bigger SUVs.
And of course, people completely ignore how poorly those vehicles handle. They can't turn on a dime, can't brake worth shit, and are prone to rolling.
I feel like driver's ed courses should include having to do emergency maneuvers in both a giant Chevy Suburban or Ford Expedition as well as a smaller Toyota Camry, or even a Miata.
You know what's better than a car that protects you during a crash? One that's agile enough to avoid it to begin with.
This brought back a sad memory. I happen to have a .to domain (from the Kingdom of Tonga) and used to write a blog there.
In 2006, the Crown Prince and Princess of Tonga, Tu’ipelehake and Kaimana, were killed along with their driver Vinisia Hefa when their Ford Explorer rolled over multiple times after being clipped by a speeding driver on Highway 101 through Menlo Park.
I can't second-guess the past, but I have a feeling that if they had been in a more agile vehicle, Vinisia may have been able to keep the vehicle upright and under control.
Just today I came close to having a similar incident. I was in my old Kia Rondo, a car-based "crossover SUV", making a lane change to the right on the freeway. Even after checking my blind spot I somehow missed this guy zooming up on the right.
He honked, I swerved, the Rondo handled well, no harm done. And I am hopeful that even if we had clipped each other, my car-driving reflexes would have worked.
I shudder to think what might have happened if I was driving one of those huge truck-based SUVs.
The speed of the airbag is remarkable. It's fully deployed and waiting moments after impact (see 54s, easier to see with 0.25 playback speed). Perhaps a rare example of an explosion that saves lives.
Yes, it's really cool to see. I imagine it's really scary to experience in a less dramatic situation, i.e. when you're not crashing but still having the bag inflate while in the driver's seat (hit when standing still etc).
This article [1] has good technical details about construction and so on, two facts: the bag moves at around 200 mpg (322 km/h) when inflating, and it's all done in 1/25:th of a second, i.e. 40 ms.
I watched a video a while back where a BMW driver just drives off a cliff (and survives). He had an in-car camera. Apparently BMWs sense free-fall and just go ahead and deploy the airbags. They were fully inflated seconds before he hit the ground, probably saving his life. I thought this was a pretty interesting safety feature.
They installed a divider on the Golden Gate Bridge back in 2015, and there was an unintended consequence of drivers speeding more because the perception of safety increased.
This is a phenomenon called risk compensation. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation) covers the mechanism well, but misses one important thing - in every study that was ever done, the risk compensation effect was less than the safety effect introduced. E.g. the Golden Gate bridge barrier was a big increase in safety, and while people driving faster mitigates some of it it's still definitely an improvement.
[I don't have data on the Golden Gate Bridge specifically, just using it as an example]
That's on purpose. Used to be they only tested straight-on crashes. Of course this ment that car manufacturers only optimized for that situation. In the real world you're rarely aiming squarely for the front of the other car though, so those sorts of crashes were rather a lot more lethal until crash testing started taking them into account.
It's also generally just a harder crash for a car to deal with, so it makes sense to use in a comparison like this.
Unfortunately they may be over-optimizing... https://danluu.com/car-safety/ discusses "gaming" the tests. Maybe protect the driver more at the passenger's expense.
It also distributes stress between the "safety cage" around the passengers and the structures on the side of the car. Modern cars respond pretty well to a perfect head-on collision but things get messy with an offset crash.
That passenger is fucked. Huge forces will be applied to the legs and transmitted to the pelvis and other body parts. Probable femoral, pelvic and especially acetabular fractures. Important nearby structures may also be damaged, including major blood vessels which could cause severe bleeding.
An variation of the above question: in the event of a side curtain airbag deployment, what happens to rear-seat passengers who rest their heads on the doors?
Nothing much, probably. Unless they somehow manage to get their head in between the glass and curtain airbag. With side impacts from cars on cars the door frames will bulge out at the top which may allow for more space for the curtain airbags. Though I feel this won’t help when you get t-boned by a F350 in your sedan.
There was recently a souped up car from the 60s crashing in traffic in LA due to the brakes failing. Has anyone got the video link? They had GoPro's so pretty amazing to see their reactions.
They drove a faulty car knowingly, riding the brakes and cooked them.
Then in the video all they talk about is their injuries and how bad it was for them and damage to their clown car, no concern for the innocent person they hit.
are there no mandatory safety checks in the US? In most countries i've been in, a "home improved" car like this would need to be homologated before being driven on a public road
Only 15 states have requirements for regular safety inspections. A few more have some one time inspections when transfering a car.
Otherwise in the majority of states there are no inspections, or only emissions inspections (the later tend to only be required in specific cities/counties).
Vehicle inspection rules vary from state to state. In Maryland, a vehicle must be inspected for safety when registered, then every couple of years for emissions. In the District of Columbia, there is a safety and emissions inspection every two years. My recollection is that Pennsylvania and Colorado inspect cars every couple of years. In DC the safety inspection is done by the city, elsewhere by approved service stations.
Are there any statistics on how much higher the survival rate is in a larger car rather than a smaller car? (assuming roughly equivalent safety technology).
I drove a 59 Catalina for a summer and thought it was a lead sled. It weight about the same as a modern sedan. Blew my mind until I thought about the lack of electronics and safety equipment
Not every "classic" car looked good and not every current car looks bad. Just with Chevy models during the muscle car era you had the Greebrier, Vega, or 4 door models of Nova/Chevelle.
Most modern coupes and sedans look like eggs or computer mice. They're bland and uninteresting. Boxy cars from the 80's had way more personality - even the ugly ones.
In my opinion, the Countach or even the DeLorean had a design aesthetic that felt like a pinnacle that we've since strayed far, far away from. I don't want a bar of Dial soap. I want a sci-fi dream.
I'd like it if cars came as a kit you could heavily customize, like a PC. Maybe with the simpler construction of EVs this will become possible. I know I'd put a lot of attention into it.
As vain and unimportant as it may be, appearance is my #1 most valued trait and deciding factor when I buy vehicles. Everything else is secondary.
I do honestly think those cars, and most of the sports cars from the 70's (edit: 80's) look like rolling refrigerators. Especially when they are painted white. I think car design has declined since the 60's, after regulators started becoming too fussy about stuff like "safety" and "pedestrian safety" and "seatbelts" etc etc. As this video shows, there was once a time when you gambled with your life every time you strayed onto the motorway, but the reward was you got to drive a beautiful car like the Bel Air, it was gut wrenching to watch it being destroyed. Nobody will miss that Malibu.
Well, sure. There's always an exception to the rule. Overall, I would agree that classic cars relied more on form than function. This was a pain in that, sometimes the things that would make a car look pretty would break or wear out quickly, making it exceptionally ugly unless it was replaced. This put a kind of strain on the owner that was unfortunate. Other cars just came ugly by default, like you mentioned. As a generally rule though, I would at least say that when a classic car was ugly, it was trying to do something different.
And of course, yes, there are some modern cars that look neat. Usually when I see a modern car (or truck) that looks exceptionally interesting to the eye, it's in a vein of either:
1) "Artificial Badass" (Ford Raptor, H3, etc.)
2) "Speedbro" (Subaru Impreza)
Neither thing is bad, per say. However, what I was advocating is not something to impress or intimidate others, like those cars try to do, but instead to offer something that is simply aesthetically pleasing. Something that doesn't need to imply that the driver is cool or whatever, but just that the driver has some style. Some pzazz. Something for the owner, not the audience. I do that there has been something lost over the decades where average cars that average people could drive and feel happy to have driven it, is gone.
If you're not sure what I mean, consider the following offers that an average person might afford: 2009 Saturn Astra, 2010 Toyota Camry, 2012 Chevrolet Impala, 2009 Honda Civic
There's just nothing there that would make someone be proud to be an owner of any of those cars. They are just these bog standard, sad turds putting around on four wheels. They are the Dell OptiPlex XE3 of the car world. Uninspired. Uninteresting. Drab. It pains me to see these eye sores. The manufacturer could have at least provided interesting coats of paint from the factory. It's just various shades of champagne colored trash, lost in a sea of mediocrity.
To be fair, there are some more recent models of cars that seem to at least attempt to do something with the grill/radiator area to make them stand out in some token gesture, which I feel is reasonable. I just feel awful that there are so many makes and models of cars out there that are essentially indistinguishable from one another...unless you can afford to spend thousands of dollars more to get something vaguely nicer looking, which is a big ask for anyone on a budget.
A friend of mine is of the opinion that all safety improvements in cars should be reverted on the grounds that killing more motorists is good for the planet. At first I thought this was ridiculous. But now that we're deep into the climate hypercrisis, I'm not so sure...
My slightly more moderate view is that safety improvements should be focussed solely on preserving life outside the vehicle (both in terms of safety from crashes and damage to the environment).
Put a giant spike sticking out of the steering column that protrudes more and more as you drive above 30 mph for instance...
Even if they hadn't strategically picked that model of old car for maximum crunch factor anyone without a seat belt may as well be on a motorcycle.
Edit: Deleted the rest of the comment, It is not worthwhile to have a nuanced discussion about the merits of the various safety improvements with this community.
>...by not doing a offset test or picking literally anything but a GM X-frame car (notoriously bad at overlap crashed, even by 1950s standards)
So you are mad that they used a street legal car of the day to show that things have improved?
A fun historical fact I just discovered, "Ford offered seat belts as an option in 1955. These were not popular, with only 2% of Ford buyers choosing to pay for seatbelts in 1956" [0]. Which reads to me that many 1959 drivers would have been unlikely to have or use a seatbelt.
I think the point is that an X-frame is extremely weak, so they showed one of the worst cars in 1959 to be in a crash with; many other cars of the time had full perimeter frames:
It’s a useful piece of context but it’s not really like the x-frame was niche and cherry-picked for this example. They sold a lot of these things (the platform, not just bel-airs)
If you step through the video with the "," and "." keys, you'll see that the steering wheel ends up in contact with the drivers seatback. A seatbelt that holds the driver in place doesn't help if there is no safe space for a body.
The 59 GM Full Sizes with an X frame did particularly poorly in overlap crashes - it would have performed better with a full head on - or a slimly later one with a permitter frame.
It's also a more likely type of crash to occur. Not many cases where one would square off the hit straight on, I'd imagine rather most cases at least one occupant is trying to avoid the crash by moving to the right.
A seatbelt wouldn't have helped much; maybe the Bel-Air driver would've been flung around a bit less, but one would still be crushed within what's effectively a giant crumple zone.
And that’s if you weren’t already dead from having your chest caved in by a non-collapsible steering column (Remember, a seat belt in this era meant a lap belt only.
The article states this was to “celebrate” the 50th anniversary of the test institute in 2009.
I agree with your point about controlling for variables but it does not seem to be the goal of the video.
The 64 sedan had 3 point lap belts and a roll cage reinforcing the passenger compartment. Not really a particularly compelling example of a typical ‘64 sedan…
Neither my 1965 coupe or 1966 convertible Mustangs came from the factory with lap belts. Both have subsequently been modified to have (2 point) lap belts, which still feel sketchy as hell to me.
Have you used aftermarket 3 point belt? A family member's Ranchero had them; the shoulder restraint slid into the lap belt near the buckle, but if you moved it would slip out. I can't imagine that being helpful in a crash, just a tethered weight to fly around.
I fitted the lap belts to my 'vert, which was already very much not-stock when I bought it, so I didn't feel bad making even more modifications (hydraulic clutch, modern T5Z trans, electronic ignition). There isn't a good, above-the-shoulder mounting point for the shoulder belt, unless you weld in a cage or mount one to an aftermarket seat.
The coupe is a close to correct C-code, which I've driven under 1000 miles in the last decade, so I've decided to leave it with period-correct 1965 belts that a prior owner installed rather than modify the B-pillar as my exposure isn't very high on that car due to very low annual miles.
From the article:
> According to safety engineers at the scene, the driver of the 2009 Chevrolet Malibu would likely have suffered slight knee injury. The driver of the 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air would have died instantly.