Is car safety really that good?

[jakaracman]

Originally Posted by JaguarEtype i agree that its frustrating here in oz people regularly tailgate and chop n change lanes with little or no indication and in very short distances..

Just out of curiosity, what is a very short distance in oz terms? 10 meters at 130 kph? 5 meters? 20 meters? (or shoud I say 2 cars, 1 car, 5 cars distance ...)

[ZfrkS62]

Originally Posted by JaguarEtype posted by irrational_i And in the end the guy who writes off his car is fine, but the crappy car full of dead people that can't afford help are not so well off. i used to think i was perfectly safe in my 20 yr old car cause it got a hell of a safety rating but i recently watched an NCAP test of 2 cars, both the same model but 1 was 9 years older the other was new, both had a five star rating. however in a offset head on collision at 35mph... the 9 yr old car was obliterated (unsurvivable for the driver) showing that there are huge differences in the structural integrity as well as placement of crumple zones with newer cars i recently looked into a thread where some guy in a Lambo Gallardo crashed into an Audi 80 at 120 mph and the driver of the lambo survived but the audi driver didnt (i was expecting the complete opposite) obviously people in cars even 10 or so years older are at a disadvantage compared to people with new cars as for driver aids, if you are in an older car you just have to accept its short comings and adjust your driving to compensate, such as leaving larger distances for braking .... (you can however put on big fat sticky tyres 8) which will help) i agree that its frustrating here in oz people regularly tailgate and chop n change lanes with little or no indication and in very short distances.. where by they often slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the car infront of them (as they had just accelerated to get around you) which always makes it annoying to leave distances between you and the car infront knowing this will happen sooner or later as SPEEDKILLAR said in the end they will be more upset and wearing a larger cost for repairs, hopefully you wont be held accountable... thats the worrying part

Yeah, but put a 58 Impala up against a 2003 Impala and see which one gets away

Once the departure from full on steel cars was complete and crumple zones started becoming the selling point for safety, it seemed like structural integrity took a couple steps backwards.

Now that the years have progressed and more and more data has been collected, not to mention the introduction of programs like AutoCad, and simulations can be run on a computer long before an insurance carash test rig, we're seeing a higher instance of survivors in crashes that 10 years ago there wouldn't have been a chance of a cockroach escaping (i refer you to the X5 vs. M5 Thamar posted awhile back)

As long as cars are on the road there will always be fatal accidents unfortunately. but with cars making leaps and bounds in safety advancements, the number of those wrecks will continue to decline.

[JaguarEtype]

jakaracman wrote

Just out of curiosity, what is a very short distance in oz terms? 10 meters at 130 kph? 5 meters? 20 meters? (or shoud I say 2 cars, 1 car, 5 cars distance ...)

hmm well it would be hard to describe, but say at 60kmh they would often drive less than 2 car spaces prob ten meters, obviously there will be a few that are much closer or a further away, the odd thing is... they generally dont back off when its rained or is raining they keep the same distances..... (bad idea) loads of accidents, i while ago it actually hailed really heavily in my area and there were loads of accidents because people simply didnt compensate for it...
in Brisbane theres also a big thing with the transport authority having various speed zones ie you can change the speed zone like 6 times over a few km its rediculous
what you often find is people will have a certain distance for say 50 or 60 kmh.. but it will also be the same distance for 70 or 80 kmh
when i was in melbourne on some uni trip the bus driver was barely 3 cars away from a car infront whilst doing 80 or 90 kmh, its situations like that where there is no way he would be able stop (without crashing into the car infront) if there was an incident ahead

with reference to car crashes what often happend in the old days with cars is that the car was made like a brick shit house, would barely deform.. but the occupants would endure a majority of the forces involved, and thats what often killed them

i used to think that crumple zones was bullshit and just a marketing ploy to charge you heaps for bits of plastic body work but it does have a hell of an effect in reducing forces on occupants

[ZfrkS62]

i used to think that crumple zones was bullshit and just a marketing ploy to charge you heaps for bits of plastic body work but it does have a hell of an effect in reducing forces on occupants

yeah, i always thought it was stupid to deform a car that easily. But then i realized the longer the car is in contact with the object it's hitting, the less inertia is transfered to the driver. Which is still to say that a muscle car vs a civic won't yeild a totalled civic and a scratched muscle car

[JaguarEtype]

an incident i found hilarious a number of years ago back when i was in the UK was when Ford had just released an escort with side intrution beams (which are nothing like the size of the beams you'd find in a volvo).
what happend was a guy in one of these new escorts pulled out of a parking spot or out of a corner i cant remember exactly and was hit side on by an old Rolls royce (which weight about 3 tonnes) the old guy in the roller said he was probably doing less than 55kmh... never the less it killed the guy in the escort....

[pharzo]

never the less it killed the guy in the escort....

Wow that one still has me laughing uncontrollably :roll:

[ZfrkS62]

that's the only thing that scared me about my Z was someone broadsiding me like that. you talk about a tin can under an anvil..i would have been toast

Won't stop me from getting another one though

[rk331]

I think that today the cars deforms intelligently, the forces of an impact are distributed not only in the zone of the impact, that forces, in a front impact are distributed by the pillars A thru the pillars C, so the force deform all the car turning the force of the impact in movement and heat. When you see a impact in a car the most important is the safe cell, I mean all the cockpit, it don`t have to deform by any circumstances. By the way, the impact tests are made at 54Km/h, and the data that the manufactures gives to us is valid if you crash at the same conditions. What is the legal speed maximum in your country? here is 110Km/h It's the double of the test. So, I think that the test must be done at the maximum speed aproved by the goverments.

[pharzo]

Probably because most crashes into non-deformable barriers are in the city, hence speeds of ~50 KM/h

If you crash at 110 KM/h into a non-deformable barrier, you can be inside a Volvo crossed with a Renault, you're not gonna make it

[rk331]

Maybe could exist 2 tests, with deformable barriers and with non-deformable barriers, because is more dangerous to sell the idea about your "safe" car when the test was made at low speed, only in the 40% of the front area and with a deformable wall.