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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.
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.
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."
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.
Because in the real world, cars collide at an angle just short of 100% of the time. Getting an actual, straight, head-on collision is a very difficult task that requires a great deal of setup and effort on the part of the people doing the testing. In the real world, drivers don't arrange their crashes with such mathematical precision. "at an angle" is pretty much a given...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Modern car crash: $1000 for bumper and $0.10 for bandaid, total: $1000.10
Old car crash: $50 to mend scratch on bumper, $7500 for head injury, untold lost earning power because now you're an idiot, total: $7550+
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Mainly because they don't look as nice.
That said, a car accident has a massive amount of energy involved even at low speeds. That energy has to go somewhere. In a new car the energy goes into destroying the vehicle or parts of it. In an old car the energy goes into throwing the driver around. Essentially, at some people people decided that losing a car is preferably to losing their life or suffering life long disability.
OK, so if you have a collision, you have kinetic energy that WILL be dissipated. It's is going to go somewhere; it cannot just be swept under the rug.
If you make the car 100% rigid and ensure that the driver is tightly secured - as some NASCAR feeder series cars were in the late 80s and early 90s - then that energy is fed into the occupants. Subject them to 50Gs and you start ripping hearts loose in chest cavities and inducing massive concussions as the front of the skull decelerates the brain. This is suboptimal for survival.
So the car's structure has to be designed to dissipate that energy to a survivable level. Plus street cars don't have the luxury of securing the occupants as tightly as race cars (and putting them in helmets and HANS devices) so secondary impacts within the cabin are a real concern.
A properly-engineered crumple zone not only dissipates the energy of the crash, it crushes the structure in such a way that nothing intrudes into the passenger compartment, that doors remain closed, but yet the door frames remain mostly intact so the doors can be opened more-or-less easily post impact. Granny in the back seat isn't going to be crushed by a flying engine block that winds up in her lap, and little Jimmy isn't going to bleed to death while the EMS crew watches because it takes a hydraulic ram to wrench the door open to get at him.
The crash engineering really is amazing. It is incredible just how well the structures are tuned to maximize occupant survivability.
And pedestrian survivability as well. Almost a third of "Unsafe at Any Speed" (credit the devil, Nader wrote a groundbreaking book) was dedicated to discussing vehicle-vs-pedestrian impacts, and how decorative designs like the "missiles" on the hoods and bumpers of the cars at the time were inflicting horrible wounds on people struck by them. While being hit by a car is always going to be a serious, traumatic event, you are much better off being struck by a modern car than by a "classic".
In every measurable way, modern cars are so much better than cars of just 20 years ago that it is utterly amazing - and cars 50 years ago are, in comparison, steam locomotives.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I love it how you claim that a test by an organization with 5 decades of experience doing this is "bogus" just because of your uninformed "intuition" about old cars.
... and then they built the supercollider.