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'09 Malibu Vs. '59 Bel Air Crash Test
theodp writes "To celebrate their 50th anniversary, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashed a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air into a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. Hate to spoil the ending of the video, but if you find yourself participating in a similar car-jousting contest, pick the Malibu over the Bel Air. (Not that you'll be complaining afterwards if you don't, or doing much of anything.) Guess there is something to those crumple zones after all."
Why would the pointlessly ruin a 1959 Belair? It's not like they make those anymore.
All I can say is "You bastards! You murdered a car with tail fins! Have you no heart?
Right around that year GM went to a wild X-frame design which allowed the door sills to be moved down several inches, making the cars easier to step out of. But the X was not very strong-- there were plenty of news photos showing Impalas broken in half by not very hard accidents.
Also if you look at a 50's car, the bumpers are massive but held up by a couple thin pieces of mild steel stock-- a strong toddler could bend them out of place.
CitroÃn had unibody, disc brakes, and the equivelent of crush zones. The were required however to put a 5mph bumper on the car instead of the 4kph as in europe due to US insurance demand. Would like to know how the test would have looked against a Cit.
Now this is a story all about how my life got flip turned upside-down. I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there, I'll tell you how I totally destroyed a classic car in the name of science.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Seriously, can anyone see an engine in the BelAir?
The comments on the video are rather telling. A number of people claim the video must have been faked, because "The Chevy would have barely gotten scratched."
Notably, a number of the panelists on the hearing about the sinking of the Titanic expressed serious doubts that mere ice could have torn iron. In other words, time marches on, but ignorance of physics remains a constant. (Also see, "This is the first time in the history of mankind that fire has melted steel.")
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
A recent TopGear did something similar: they crashed an NCAP (European crash standards body) 5 star+ rated (the highest rating) car (Renault Espace) into an earlier model of the same car (a 1998 Espace I think it was) at 35 mph.
The crash investigator they had evaluate the results said the driver of the older car would have had multiple broken bones, including both femurs, and even if he'd survived the crash he would have bled to death by the time they could extract him, which would take 30-40 minutes as the car was so badly deformed.
In contrast, the modern Espace's computers decided the crash wasn't bad enough to deploy the air bags! Only the seat belt pre-tensioners fired. The investigator thought everyone in that car would have walked away from the accident uninjured.
Their conclusion was that modern crumple zones and stiffer chassis work but because they are stiffer older cars suffer much more when colliding with a modern car.
What always surprises me is how much damage is done to any car, old or new, at these low speeds! Really says to me that any speed limit over 40 mph on any single-carriage way road is just insane.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
A few people were calling shenanigans, claiming there was no drive train or that the IIHS used a vehicle with a rusted out frame.
So a writer for the NY Times caught up with "David Zuby, the senior vice president at the institute's crash-test center in Virginia"
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/more-details-about-1959-bel-air-crash-test/
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I realize the crash-test setup and standards continually change, but is there any sort of archive of data tables, or graphs, or something of that sort, showing improvement over time? Like, can I see what the difference in forces on the driver or likelihood of serious injury would be for a 1985 Civic vs. a 2005 Civic going 40 mph into a barrier?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
/patiently wates for some idiot to ignore the fact that road deaths are consistently going down in absolute terms, and in per-vehicle-mile terms; and to claim that dangerous cars/roads are 'safer', that everyone overcompansates for advances in safety, and that cars should have a spike on the steering wheel.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Top Gear tries to stay away from useful facts and info as much as possible.
And the idea of Top Gear having TWO cars that cost below $40,000 on the screen at the same is pretty far fetched.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I'd feel much more safe driving a Chevy Bel-Air than a new Malibu, feeling you dont bump and hurt yourself is just as important as knowing you "probably wont die". Because a Bel-air you feel you are driving something, whereas in a new Malibu, you just direct it. It can be compared to flying in an airplane, if you are not in control enough, you might fear flying no matter how much you know about how safe it is, compared to driving. Today Bel-air drivers do not crash, simply because they care about driving and their car, but that is of course irrelevant to this, but i state this nevertheless.
One reason that the door crumpled so readily is the crazy wraparound windshield. The windshield pillar contains a free-hanging right angle, which is not the way that a structural engineer would have done it. It also bangs the knees.
The big problem with older cars is that the body shape was sculpted from clay in a studio separate from the rest of the car designers, rather than being designed as part of an automobile. The end result being that the body shape had no basis in sound mechanical design.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
You are quite right, the '59 Chevy's in particular are as strong as warm butter. The end result should come as no surprise to anybody, who has worked on or driven any of these cars.
What I hate the most about the test though, is that they bought somebody's prized classic car and crashed it. Just look at the second video with interior footage. It even has a radio and two antennas in the rear. Couldn't they at least have removed that grille before destroying the car...? (No, guess not...)
Some celebration. God, I hate American companies sometimes...
My friend, many motorcyclists care deeply about their bikes, but that does not prevent surgeons from referring to them as "organ donors".
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Isn't it strange how they never mention the speeds of the vehicles?
And why do they collide at an angle, because that definitely favors one style of construction over another - frame, engine placement, driver's side vs. passenger side, body materials, bumpers, etc.
Just a waste of a good old car that would be running in 100 years, unlike the 2009 plasticized obsolescence prone electronically "enhanced" US style-over-substance car.
Sigh...!
i have long argued this with my "car friends" - a body-on-frame situation doesn't help you much.
dumber people are doing harder things everyday
So they destroyed a CLASSIC CAR THAT STOPPED BEING MAGE 50 YEARS AGO just to celebrate their 50th anniversery?
Hope the asshats who made that decision aren't around much longer.....
Yes. How dare we sacrifice something in order to learn!
Yes. How dare we sacrifice something in order to learn!
While this video is interesting in an abstract kind of way, I can't help but wonder what you think we really 'learn' from it? We know that 1950s cars weren't built with much attention paid to crash safety, and while it does clearly demonstrate that a modern car is much safer than a car of that era, there are so few of those cars still on the road that you can hardly argue that it will even convince drivers to switch from unsafe old cars to much safer new ones.
That said, if they did only pay $200 for it then it was probably a clunker which was not worth repairing; though then you have to wonder whether it was really a good example to use in a crash test (e.g. rotten structural members or whatever).
One member of the pedestrian advocacy community refers to these innovations as "safe crashing". They make drivers safer, but also encourage more risky driving, putting unprotected pedestrians at disproportionate risk.
Given that the Toyota and the Lexus are, actually, materially different (different materials, different design), I'm not sure how you can claim that because their scores are 30% apart, a 30% difference is immaterial.
Worse, the logic leap from that to say that the Ford brand, at 30% higher than Toyota, is basically equivalent to Toyota is a little breathtaking. By that logic, if we agree that 30% is basically a rounding error and we can ignore it, then it's worth noting that since the Kia, at 278, is only 30% higher than the Ford, it really should be considered equal in quality. In fact, since the Land Rover, at 368, is LESS than 30% higher than the Kia, it should be considered equal in quality.
And therefore, we can easily determine that the Land Rover, at 368, is basically equal in quality to the Lexus, at 120.
Brilliant!
If you look at the video, they didn't do a head-on crash - it was left-front fender against left-front fender. In a head-on, the Bel-Airs' much more massive engine block would have cut through the Malibu.
My dad's got a 1946 Dodge pickup. Pickups are notoriously unsafe, but the bumpers on this thing are attached directly to the frame. Both the frame and the bumpers are made of steel about half an inch thick, and the bumpers stick out a good foot ahead of and behind the body.
It would be a lousy thing to crash in -- no seat belts, metal dashboard. But for your ordinary low-speed fender bender it would total any modern car on the road.
Why don't they make cars with REAL bumpers?
I piss off bigots.
It's nothing to do with cheapness (steel girders are a lot cheaper than all the R&D needed to design good crumple zones) it's to do with safety and weight reduction.
Crumple zones are safer. If you're sat in a rigid box then you take a much higher G-force peak than if you're sat in something that deforms. What are you more worried about in a head-on, yourself or the car?
Crumple zones mean weight is only added where it's needed, body panels can be thinner/lighter. Less weight means better performance and fuel economy. I realize a light car is unpatriotic in the USA but the savings in fuel, tires and insurance (light car=smaller engine) will more than offset the slightly higher number of dents from not lugging 2000 pounds of useless steel with you everywhere you go.
No sig today...
All cars older than 10 years should be banned from the roads and a few best examples should be put in the museums with disabled engines - the rest should be just crushed. The impact on the society from them and the irresposible people drive these cars is way too great: more emmissions, more pollution in cities, more crashes, more maintenance costs, higher healthcare costs for all the injured people, higher insurance premiums from all the dead people, ...
BAN THE CLUNKERS!
Good thing Bush isn't around any more - he'd buy into it.
Actually all passengers inthe Malibu would have only minor injuries, while all Bel Air passengers would most likely be dead.
You can pry the 1969 Pontiac Firebird and those beautiful classic GTO's out from under the pile of protesters. I'll be right there protecting our automotive heritage.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
I agree. This is the result of years of social engineering where unqualified minorities are hired into technical and scientific occupations. This sort of stupidity is the outcome of affirmative action politics. It is sad that these "scientists" would be so retarded as to destroy an irreplaceable part of our American culture. But then again that has been their game along: to destroy the real America that belongs to you and me.
A tank will trample a tin can?
So drive a tank, you know it makes sense
Or, to put it bluntly, one huge difference between my Lexus ES 350 and the Toyota Camry parked next to it is that mine was built in Miyawaka, Japan, and the other was built in Georgetown, Kentucky.
I'm an orthopaedic surgeon, and wind up taking care of a lot of people from car accidents. Even a 10 MPH crash is enough to cause whiplash.
Car repairs are much, much cheaper than hospital bills, and there are some things that we aren't still good at fixing like cartilage damage, and whiplash - who likes chronic pain?
..........FULL STOP.
Fuzzy dice, on the Bel Air's dashboard at 1:04...who else noticed?
Crash an 09 Malibu travelling at 40mph into another 09 travelling at 40mph - or to be even more realaistic, both should be travelling at 50-60 mph. I bet the drivers will suffer more than a bruised knee or whatever. This is a pointless test
It shows how far we have advanced in the past 50 years (which seeing some of the comments on here, it apparently isn't clear to everyone that a modern car is more safe than an older one).
What this does is keep advancements in safety technology at the forefront of the publics minds so that government programs and private car companies will continue to invest in advancements in crash safety.
You may find this somewhat surprising, but the weight differential between older cars and newer cars really isn't all that much:
The manufacturer's curb weight of the Bel Air was 3,615. The published curb weight of the Malibu was 3,436. A mere 179 lbs is probably not the weight differential you were expecting.
link
What's really happened is newer cars have their weight distributed in different patterns than older cars. Whatever we're saving on uni-body vs. a body on frame construction we're putting right back in with a dozen airbags, miles of wiring, power windows in each door, sound deadening, etc.
Wow
Watching that crash porn really got my engine revved.
For some reason I feel compelled to have sex with Holly Hunter now.
Best of all, the price of a Ford vehicle is less, by several thousand dollars, than the price of a Toyota vehicle. If you value your hard-earned money, then buy a Ford Fusion instead of a Toyota Camry.
However, if you have any appreciation for aesthetics at all, buy the Toyota. The latest crop of Fords are butt-ugly.
While quality is important, there's other factors that are important in the purchase of a car. Why spend all that money on an ugly car?
Marty, he's in a '46 Ford, we're in a DeLorean. He'd rip through us like we were tin foil.
Am I the only one who thinks the fuzzy dice in the Bel Air contributed to the impact in a nontrivial way? Imagine all that foam bouncing around on the dash - that has to be part of what caused that Bel Air to sustain such major damage.
Clearly newer cars win hands down and save lives in a high speed collision.
The opposite perception is probably based on low speed fender benders. These days, you can do thousands in damage backing your SUV into a pole at 5 mph, an incident that wouldn't even leave visible damage on the older cars. In those situations, the older cars were clearly superior.
What we need is a modern design, crumple zones and all, but designed so they only come in to play when actually useful.
What I'd really like to see is a comparison between a '70s era car and a new one. Safety engineering was being done then (unlike the '50s where tempered glass and seat belts were both considered optional). While a single incident is hardly a study, I was once rear-ended while driving a 77 Olds. The other car (a no longer recognizable late '80s something) was a total loss, radiator driven back into the fan, front end crumpled with tires burst by the fenders, hood bent 90 degrees, etc. I had a little dent in my bumper. The next day, I picked the fragments of the other guy's grill and parking lights out of my license plate frame.
I suspect that at some point in the '80s we went right past the optimal design point until today where even so-called off road vehicles are fragile.
As a comparison, 2 model Ts could collide head on at full speed with no significant damage. Of course both drivers would likely be dead.
"All cars older than 10 years should be banned from the roads and a few best examples should be put in the museums with disabled engines"
-Do *YOU* want to pay for my new car every 10 years?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
> if you have any appreciation for aesthetics at all, buy the Toyota
That's probably the fist time something like this has been said, ever. The recent US Fords aren't too bad (except the "new" Focus), but when somebody really has an appreciation for aesthetics, they get an Alfa-Romeo or something else Italian which doesn't have a Fiat badge.
Dear God, Please let this be the scary-good sarcasm I think it is (and, if so, a big "nice one" to the parent). Your supplicant, ac666
"Now this is a story all about how my chevy got crushed, turned inside out..."
Modern cars are much more crashworthy and safer than old cars. But this video is a bit of an intentional misrepresentation of reality. Starting with the 1959 models, GM went to a modified unit body construction, eliminating the two, heavy, car-length frame rails that ran the length of the car, and instead mounting a small front frame to attach the engine and transmission to a newly designed unit-body passenger compartment. The aim was to lower the car's profile and to improve head-on collision crash survivability. In the new design the front end was designed as a crush zone- no more instant stop for the passengers when two rigid-frame cars collided head on. Also the engine would no longer end up in the passenger compartment when it broke loose from the frame in a bad accident; instead the engine would absorb much of the front end impact and then slid slide harmlessly underneath the passenger compartment when the subframe collapsed (that was what the wide "hump" in the middle of the floor of the 1959 car was all about). One result of this new design was to make the 1959 cars more dangerous in one type of accident, a "corner to corner" collision, one where the impact was head on but the two cars overlapped a bit but not enough so that the engines absorbed the impact- it was a design tradeoff. The Insurance Institute, which is, after all, a self-congratulatory lobbying group, reproduced that one type of accident here on purpose to showcase the results it wanted you to see. The Institute moved the impact point so that only 40-45% of the cars would overlap (see the overhead view at 1:16-18 in the shockwave flash cited- http://www.autoblog.com/2009/09/26/pics-aplenty-iihs-reveals-before-and-after-of-malibu-bel-air-cr/ ). This is enough overlap to make full use of the new car's unit front end, roll cage and air bags (note even the windshield stays in and absorbs energy), but the overlap is small enough that the old car's engine and transmission, designed to absorb energy in a head on collision, were just outside the accident zone and did not absorb any of the impact energy. If the institute had shown a real head on collision the results would have been very, very different, with the damage much more equal. And a 1958 Chevy in a corner-to-corner would have performed much better. New cars are nifty, but this is a piece of propaganda designed to "educate the masses".
Just one week ago, I was having lunch at my brother's girlfriend's, who is a teacher in history of sciences, and at a moment said how puzzled she was by a physicist she knows who does't like his cars not to have a tough hull.
A physicist, dammit! She opposed him arguments about elastic and inelastic collisions, but nope, to him a car with a deformable hull is shitty. Go figure.
There's nothing like $HOME
And the Camry isn't ugly? You don't really have a choice when buying new. You will spend far too much money on an ugly car.
I'd be more interested in seeing a SUV like a Hummer verses a car like a Honda Fit. Andï people wonder why there isn't a higher adoption of green vehicles.
There should be a re-test! The engineers had no way to know that their work would be destroyed against such advanced technology. Think of the poor engineers reputation!
Let's take the 09 Malibu, and crash it with the 2059 Malibu... I bet that would be a fair comparison!
... and the test was interesting (and a little sad) to me too. The one thing that I have noticed in the last 10 years is new cars now have REALLY great brakes when compared to mine and most drivers have adapted their driving habits (i.e. braking later) to them.
Oh please. We're not talking about actually beautiful cars (with high price tags that normal people can't afford, and which are completely impractical for day-to-day driving), we're talking about regular cars that regular middle-class people would buy as their primary vehicle.
If you're stuck with buying a regular sedan, why would you buy the butt-ugly Ford, when you can get a plain but quite decent-looking Toyota?
Just because it isn't a work of art like a Ferrari doesn't mean it needs to be butt-ugly. Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, etc. make loads of very decent-looking, conservatively-styled cars for regular people on a budget. For some reason, the American makers are mostly unable to make a decent-looking car. Most of them are horrendous. Only Chrysler seems to be any good at styling among the American makes. GM had a whole division whose motto was "bold styling": Pontiac. Want to see an example of their wonderful styling? Google the "Aztek". Now, GM has closed that division because it was doing so poorly. The Japanese are much smarter: they don't bother with "bold styling"; they stick to conservative styling that people don't hate, keep quality high, enjoy high resale values (because of the long legacy of the first two), and even in an economic crisis don't have to declare bankruptcy or ask for a bail-out.
Leave the beautiful cars to the makers like Aston-Martin, Ferrari, Maserati, etc. with $100k+ price tags. The rest of us want cars that look nice but not gaudy, and Ford (and GM) can't deliver that.
Drive a Malibu and a Belair into a lake and see who gets out before drowning.
Chances are the Belair driver will survive, because it doesn't have electric windows. The electrics go almost imediately underwater and you can't roll down the windows and with the windows closed you can't open the doors because of the pressure.
Then they wouldn't mind being killed a little more would they?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
One was the comment on the video, "clearly the malibu driver was at fault - he should have given way" and also, did anyone else notice the Nissan Commercial in the videos to the right? The one about Front independent suspension?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Compared to a Ford? No.
Japanese makes are well-known to have very conservative styling. While it's criticized by many as "bland", it's better to be "bland" than to be "butt-ugly".
If anyone is interested here is another video of the same crash but this one shows different angles including what is going on inside the cars and what the drivers are going through.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xwYBBpHg1I
If they'd of used Christine, the outcome may have been a lot different.
;)
And I'm not saying that cause I own one.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
The one thing that I have noticed in the last 10 years is new cars now have REALLY great brakes when compared to mine and most drivers have adapted their driving habits (i.e. braking later) to them.
Might want to get your brakes looked at, maybe replace the pads. I expect it's possible to replace the brakes altogether with more modern brake actuators and materials, but I don't know if you can get the latest in ABS if your car doesn't have the capability to begin with.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
I'm going to start with trains. Trains in the U.S. practice collision survival whereas trains in Europe and Asia use collision avoidance.
The same principle applies to automobiles, collision survival vs. avoidance. We're starting to see a little feature creep in that respect but it won't come soon enough for my tastes. Right now the collision avoidance is a passive device, it warns if you're getting too close. Instead the car should simply take over to preserve itself.
Old cars used drum brakes front and rear. They really suck compared to disc brakes. I leave a LOT of space in front of me when driving the old boat, for this reason.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Take a close look. The Malibu crumpled, but the Bel Air flattened. The cars of the 50's had a ridged frames and most likely would slice through a modern car like a knife through butter. Didn't GM also rig SUVs with rockets and such in demo videos. Looks like they are at it again.
The bonnet didn't show any sign of crumpling / bending, and could very well have intruded the '09 interior through the windshield, neatly decapitating the driver. Sadly, it happened historically. That would have avenged the old lady.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When those things wreck, they disintegrate. The whole car seems to come apart, and you are amazed the driver could survive. However, it is BECAUSE they come apart like that that the driver survives. They have a rigid cage enclosing the driver, and a compliant body. That way the body takes the massive energies involved in the rapid acceleration to a stop, rather than them being transferred to the person.
That whole pesky F=MA thing applies to cars just as well as anything else. When a massive object like a car rapidly accelerates to a stop, there is a shit ton of energy. How that energy is dealt with and dissipated can be the different between a person having a bruise, and dying from their internal organs being destroyed.
The video shows us the left side of the Bel Air (closer to the centerline of impact, gets crushed) and the right side of the Malibu (farther from centerline of impact, not directly opposite the mass of the Bel Air). This makes the Malibu come off better in the video than it probably would if the impact had been filmed from the opposite side, or if the impact had been dead center.
That said, I don't doubt that the Malibu's modern safety features would have made it a better place to sit in this crash - but I hate it when video gimmickry is added to enhance the argument. Doesn't help credibility.
Hi there, The youtube video contains the qualifier "2: Both cars were moving at 40mph for a combined speed of 80mph". This is not correct. Both cars were moving at 40mph for a combined speed of 40mph. Whether you're hitting an immovable brick wall at 40mph, or an object of equal mass and velocity moving at the opposite direction, you're still accelerating from 40mph to 0mph (a 40mph crash).
BBH
My favorite way to demonstrate crumple zone effectiveness (I have that kind of life, what can I say) is to have a friend that doesn't see the point put on a hard hat and headbutt the wall. Next, I duct tape a few pop cans to the hard hat and have them try again. Guess which one hurts less? It usually gets the point across.
Wait, whiplash is REAL?
I've been in stacks in classic car's & modern car's with crumple zones & air bags. One of the sedans so classic it had a front bench seat & manual seat belts you adjusted to perfectly fit you. I was hit in the rear @ 60kph, i think that's about 40 mph while i was stationary. Big steel bumpers that absorbed a lot of the impact. I didn't even get a concussion or headache, no whiplash. Car was very repairable. Around the bumper crumpled a bit. A 1970's Aussie Holden Torana.
You know what i want in a car? The best of both worlds. How's about a car frame that is solid enough to be repairable, external hanging panels that can crumple & absorb impact, airbags & abs brakes, hi tech seat belts and seats designed to hold you in place?
Crumple zones may reduce injuries, but i bet the car companies like them more because they help destroy car's so we have to buy new ones. Car's should be built so that if the occupant area doesn't suffer too much damage, the rest of the car can be rebuilt around it, not thrown away like currently.
Can someone use an analogy to explain this to me? Preferably one using cars.
4-8-4 vs 2009 Civic, put me in the locomotive please.
Anybody else spot the rear-view mirror decorations in the Bel Air?
I want to cast magic missile!
That's about a month old. New car wins, thanks to crumple zones. I hate that they destroyed a classic car... New style-less car wins against a classic.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Careful viewers will notice that there is no engine installed in the Bel Air.
I don't think the test is particularly enlightening, based on this fact. Sure, the engine block would still end up in the cabin, but its mass would have helped slow the crumpling of the hood.
All in all, an underwhelming "experiment".
Do you know how idiotic this sounds when you consider many car designs work on an 8-10 year life (some much longer) with mid point cosmetic "freshenings", much the same can be said for engine designs except with an even longer time period and more small upgrades along the way.
After my drive into work this morning can I also suggest all Audi, BMW and van drivers be instantly banned from driving for a period of 10 years as soon as they agree to buy one of the before mentioned vehicles.
That should cut twattish driving by >50%.
http://xkcd.com/202/
Wow. I'm surprised you have time for this slashdot claptrap. Maybe medicine doesn't have to eat your whole life after all... maybe there's time yet...
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
lugging 2000 pounds of useless steel with you
Hey, now. The only reason we even have classic cars is because they have so much steel that they can sit rotting in barns or fields for decades and still be restored. Modern cars won't last half as long with all the plastic and thinner sheet metal.
The "bigger picture," however, is that you will last longer in a modern car.
One car show did a similar test with a new compact versus a car with a huge reputation for safety - a 1990-ish Volvo stationwagon. I have personally had my mother in law talk about how she didn't want her daughter driving an unsafe small car, so she should take the old volvo. The volvo crushed the passenger compartment, the new compact was fine.
It was a 4 door anyway!
This reminds me of a question my Dad used to rant about: why can't they make cars that will withstand crashes? The answer, as I know know, is they can, but if the car doesn't absorb the energy of the impact, the occupants will.
I'd like to see an underside view of the wreck of the '59 Bel Air. I suspect the frame is bent like a parallelogram, and the front end sheet metal that intruded in to the driver's compartment all broke off its mounts in the impact. No structure, no protection of any kind. The only question for front seat passengers would be whether they went though the windshield or did a faceplant on the dash.
Some years ago I saw footage of a crash test of a 1929 Chevrolet under modern IIHS/NCAP conditions. It disintegrated on impact and was not recognizable as a car afterwards. No, I've never seen the video on line, anywhere.
...laura
Where's the full speed crash? I mean slow motion is great, from several angles, but it would be nice to see them racing at each other with a nice full speed, loud crash.
No SUV is four feet off the ground from the factory. People who mod their car or truck do so at their own risk
SUV != sports car hence driving at normal speeds they are fine. The same moron that speeds in an SUV would also speed in any other car.
SUVs roll over when put into situations where they should not be. i.e. a SUV will roll if driven off road along a steep hill. News flash: 99.999% of SUVs were not designed to be driven off road. They were designed for a paved road. Look at the ones that were designed to be driven off road. Those models do not roll over.
With backing over a child. You might want to drive some new cars. They have put backup cameras into them for the very reason that you cannot see directly behind you. I saw more behind me in the explorer I had then the altima I have now. That reason goes both ways.
Any car can be safe or unsafe. It depends on the driver of said car. Blanket statements about one class of car is wrong. And BTW, why is it that in some states the insurance rates for SUVs are higher? Because SUVs have a higher chance or surviving an accident. But that survivability comes at the cost of damaging the other car more. That is a quote from 5 different insurance companies.
I will be flamed for this, but the small car rules all thinking is wrong. Some people have a reason for that SUV. I needed a SUV to haul stuff (either the doors, sheet rock, other large things to fix up my place or a friends. The coolers, fishing rods, other fishing or camping stuff for trips). Renting a SUV/truck every weekend did not make sense over owning it and not having to pay the fee every weekend.
I was in 3 accidents while I had the car (12 years). I was rear ended 3 times. So much for the big SUV not seeing other cars, they couldn't see me. Yes my lights were working before and after the accidents, I was stopped at a traffic light for each one. I drove away from each one as well. Not so much for the cars that hit me though.
Car repairs are much, much cheaper than hospital bills
Only in America. Much of the rest of the world has socialized medicine so the hospital doesn't cost you anything.
Err....are you sure you want to stand by the claim that Lexus and Toyota are materially different? So YOU are the guy who pays an extra $25k for the Toyota with a Lexus badge!
Did you honestly just recommend the most boring car in the world (Camry) over a Fusion, based on looks? You can keep your boring, soulless, dependable Japanese transportation. I'll take the Fusion in Casino Royale, thanks.
Um, yes. The Fusion is butt-ugly. WTF is with that stupid-looking grille? The rest of the car looks just as boring and soulless as the Camry.
Why couldn't they have crashed a Yugo or something instead of the old Chev? Sad...
Body Coddington is rolling over in his grave!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Why? I saw a lot of advancement in terms of safety and emissions in the 80's and early 90's but comparatively little since. How is a well maintained 10-year-old car considerably worse than a brand a new one? Many 2009 cars are little more than the 1999 version with some changed sheetmetal and a new dashboard.
That's part of the reason why the whole cash for clunkers thing was so incredibly stupid, as lots of perfectly good late 90's and early 00's cars with functioning modern safety and emissions systems got sent to the scrapheap while most of the older unsafe pollutomobiles stayed on the road.
Some idiot in a late 80s Firebird decided to T-Bone my 1959 Impala.
The results were pretty much the opposite of what's in TFA.
There wasn't much left of the front of the Firebird. The side of my Impala was dented pretty badly, but smooth enough to be recoverable.
It screwed up my transmission mounts which turned out to be *very* expensive, but otherwise ok.
What stopped me from driving that 59 Chevy was the cost of gasoline. I stopped being able to afford it at about $1.17/gal I think, and I bought a Hyundai. I don't know who has my old Chevy today, but I think it's still in the family, so to speak.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Lighter also means lower kinetic energy, and thus less to dissipate upon crashing. That makes things a bit safer (though, of course, since kinetic energy is 1/2*mass*velocity^2 the velocity is a much larger component of the kinetic energy which must be dissipated.)
Not a sentence!
>Only in America. Much of the rest of the world has socialized medicine so the hospital doesn't cost you anything.
You mean to say that the cost of providing medical service is amortized centrally and distributed among taxpayers, right?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
>Err....are you sure you want to stand by the claim that Lexus and Toyota are materially different?
Ask people who have been to Toyota plants and have observed the way they transition the assembly line between models. It's a core element of the Toyota Production System that the assembly line can produce multiple products, as opposed to the American system of specializing an assembly line for a given model/type of vehicle. It's truly an amazing thing to observe. It's literally possible that a Camry rolled off the same assembly line right behind a Lexus ES.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
>All cars older than 10 years should be banned from the roads and a few best examples should be put in the museums >with disabled engines
Buy me a new Volvo wagon to replace my '91 740 then. Tell you what, I'll settle for just a 20% down payment on the new replacement, and it's a deal. My car has 245,000 miles on it and it's still doing just fine, thank you.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
>That said, if they did only pay $200 for it then it was probably a clunker which was not worth repairing;
It's a 1959 Chevy. The chrome trim alone can easily be sold for over a thousand dollars. Each taillight lens, depending on whether it has the chrome trim, would be about $400. The windshield glass is not available at any price, and so you could name your price for someone restoring an Impala. This car is rare, even if you consider its value as a parts car for better '59s...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Ok, the older car has a whole lot more metal than the newer car.
If the newer car had hit a tractor trailer, which is made with more metal, the newer car would have been smished.
If the newer car had hit a train, which is made with even more metal, the newer car would have been pulverized.
Suggesting that more metal would equate to more protection. Certainly more protection than what I saw in this video.
So why is the newer car, with less metal, looking better than the older car, which has more steel in it's front bumper the the newer car has throughout it's entire body.
Could it be that the 50 year old metal in the older car was just plain OLD ? Fatigued ? weakened ? not necessarily rusted, but just weaker than it was in 1959.
A possibility ?
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
Who cares? I'd rather die in an iconic car that represents American ingenuity in pushing the design envelope
from 1959 than "survive" in some lame dime-a-dozen-rental-fleet-piece-of-junk that won't last 20 years any
day of the week.
Big deal. Sure, I want safety, but geeze, why not smash some lame-o 1960s Datsun or Honda??
That would be funny!
"Yes. How dare we sacrifice something in order to learn!"
Learn what? Are you telling me that the demonstrators had to perform this test because they were to stupid to crunch the data from the decades of crash tests preceding it?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....