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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am genuinely curious where we would be now in regard to automotive safety without government regulation.
Wonder how whiplash cases have trended over time. Wouldn't be surprised if they've gone up -- more survivable crashes, haha.
Deleted Comment
Least we forget in 1959 the US car industry was already 60 years old.
The car industry fought tooth and nail against seat belts and other things like collapsible steering columns.
When incentives are aligned in the right way, good things can happen, even out of self interest.
Dead Comment
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.
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
Because all that kinetic energy didn't get dissipated and so transferred into the softest bits of the car, which in the 50's-70's car was the driver.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
[1]: https://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-reg...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Tullock#Tullock's_spike
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.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Golden-Gate-Bridge-ba...
[I don't have data on the Golden Gate Bridge specifically, just using it as an example]