Our government acknowledges that safety is important by mandating expensive and profitiable new automobile safety equipment. Yet, the same "safety conscious" (when it is profitable) government encourages the most dangerous trend in automotive history: downsizing to starve green plants of life-sustaining carbon.
The government supposedly "crash tests" cars to convince you that small cars can be just as safe as larger cars. Is that true?
No.
It is a brazen lie to steal your money. How do they try to injure or kill you and your family for money? Simple, they don't crash test cars, they crash test car.
By "crash testing" into infinite mass (an immovable wall), the tests are deliberately designed to trick you into buying the least safe newer vehicles. The test favors least safe, because safe large cars and trucks tend to do the worst. Imagine crash testing a very safe, but seat belt-free school bus into infinite mass; oh, the carnage. The test favors new, because new sales = money for campaign contributors, lobbyists, and tax collectors, when in fact bigger older cars are generally safer to drive.
To illustrate, let's crash test two cars, for real, right now.
First, we know a few facts. The NHTSA and OSA crash cars head-on into an immovable barrier at 35 mph to derive their safety rating. A 5-Star rating means you have less than a 10% chance of death. Their 4-Start rating means you have less than a 20% chance of death, or twice the chance of dying. 1-Star means 50/50 dead/alive.
So here we go, in the green corner:
2009 Honda Civic:
Crash Ratings: Driver 5-Star, Passenger 5-Star
In the red corner:
2009 Toyota Sequoia:
Crash Ratings: Driver 5-Star, Passenger 4-Star
So the Civic is twice as safe on the passenger side, right? Let's crash them and find out. To figure the impact severity as it is distributed between two inelastic cars (meaning they crumple instead of acting like billiard balls) traveling at the same speed, all you need to do is compare each car's mass to the total mass involved:
m1v1 + m2v2 = m(1+2)v(1+2)
5680(35) + 2588(-35) = 8268v
21.9 = v
In other words, after a 35 mph head-on, both vehicles wind up traveling at 22 mph in the + direction. The Civic passengers experience an impact equivalent to 35+22, like a 57 mph slam into an immovable brick wall (I hope that red goo isn't my friend). The Sequoia passengers experience a relatively casual 13 mph impact (did we hit something, mom?).
Your real chances of survival?
Civic passengers go from 35 mph forward to 22 mph backward ~ virtually 100% chance of death. Sequoia passengers experience 35 mph forward to 22 mph forward ~ virtually no chance of injury, their air bags won't even deploy.
Moral of the story?
Don't swerve to avoid a head-on collision with a green car, or you could die. Hit the dead man head-on, hop out and run to the nearest phone to call an ambulance.
This is the hardest I've laughed at one of your posts - nice.
ReplyDeleteImagine George Carlin performing this bit.
ReplyDeleteHow much does a Smart car weigh - I see them on the highway occasionally and wonder what would possess someone to think that was a good idea.
ReplyDeleteFor the past 30 years I had been driving a full size GM, mainly for safety reasons, but also for comfort.
ReplyDeleteI figured, if I ever got into a head-on situation, chances are I will live to bitch about paying twice as much in gas as the deceased small car driver.
Hysterical yet true.
ReplyDeleteWhat if you crash into a tree? Are you still better off in a SUV?
ReplyDelete"What if you crash into a tree? Are you still better off in a SUV?"
ReplyDeleteIt depends how big the tree is, because it isn't about the personification of SUVs, it is about mass.
Heavy SUVs are safer than lighter SUVs, and the heaviest vehicles have about 1/20th the death rate of the average weight vehicle in accidents. SUV designs are usually trickier to drive safely, so a car of the same weight would probably do better than 20 times safer.
Clearly, the best vehicle to be driving these days is a semi, preferably with a big heavy trailer behind it!
ReplyDeleteAs for safety, there are more variables than just weight. It all depends on what you crash into and how easily you can avoid the crash.
If you're crashing into a fixed barrier, a heavier vehicle will have more energy that has to be absorbed by the vehicle. The heavier the vehicle, the more challenging it is to design the structural members such that they absorb the energy of the impact while protecting the driver.
Heavier vehicles tend to be less maneuverable, so the chances of avoiding a crash in them are reduced. They also tend to have a higher center of gravity, so the chances of a rollover are increased.
The more people who take FDR's advice on a vehicle purchase, the greater the chance the vehicle you crash into will have at least as much mass as your own.
Put all these factors together and it becomes much less clear which vehicle type really yields the greatest safety.
"If you're crashing into a fixed barrier, a heavier vehicle will have more energy that has to be absorbed by the vehicle."
ReplyDeleteYou would think so, but the facts show the opposite, maybe because speeds are similar, so the heavier structure protects better. I agree that safety ratings don't seem to reflect that, which is odd, but the facts are here:
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Vehicles/VehiclesPassengerCars.aspx
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Vehicles/VehiclesLightTrucks.aspx
19% of all fatal car accidents are with fixed objects, while only 13% of all light truck fatalities are from hitting fixed objects.
Probably because even "fixed" things move more when something big hits them.
At any rate, heavier is the dominant safety factor when hitting another vehicle by simple physics dictating that a catastrophic event for a car is trivial to a truck, and also when hitting stationary objects by the empirical evidence.
Also, it is clear the government chooses to ignore 85% of all fatalities when they "crash test" (create their sales pitch).
"The more people who take FDR's advice on a vehicle purchase, the greater the chance the vehicle you crash into will have at least as much mass as your own."
Right, but that only makes it more important to compete with mass.
I wrote: "The more people who take FDR's advice on a vehicle purchase, the greater the chance the vehicle you crash into will have at least as much mass as your own."
ReplyDeleteIn response, FDR wrote: "Right, but that only makes it more important to compete with mass."
Well, perhaps. The problem is that it ends up being an escalating competition: vehicles get heavier over time while not providing any more protection from each other than they had before. On the other hand, you wind up losing the advantages that lighter vehicles brought to the table: maneuverability, efficiency, etc., some of which increase the probability of avoiding a collision entirely.
Behavior which is good for the individual in isolation isn't always good for the individual when groups engage in it.
Which is another way of saying: if you want your heavy vehicle to give you as much safety as possible, you're best off telling everyone around you to buy the lightest vehicles they can.
One other thing: despite the crash tests and the possible unstated purpose behind them that you point out, even the smallest new cars appear to have gotten heavier over time.