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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."
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.
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.
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.
Actually, no, it wouldn't.
Notwithstanding the extra weight of the iron-block, iron-head inline 6, the Malibu's motor is still a substantial chunk of metal that can be considered essentially solid. You certainly aren't going to force the I6 motor THROUGH it.
What you will do is load up the engine mounts - which are much, much stronger on the Malibu, and designed to crumple in such a way that the passenger cabin is minimally infringed.
A more likely case in a 100% head-on collision is the Bel-Air's engine coming to rest in the Bel-Air's back seat, having been forced through the cabin by the Malibu.
DG
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Offset collisions are also more dangerous to cabin occupants than full, head on collisions. Car safety tests used head on collisions for a long time, but that was abandoned in the 80s or early 90s when it became apparent that they don't reflect real life accidents or the damage they cause to occupants.
The physical reasoning behind it is pretty simple: if you are offset, there is less material to soak up the energy of the crash. Typically enough that old school engine mounts or suspension parts would fail, and cause the drivetrain parts to intrude upon the cabin, like the Bel-Air's engine did in this test.
Crumple zones were added into cars because of the high number of injuries sustained in car accidents in rigid steel frames cars. The whole point of a crumple zone is for it to crumple reducing the collision energy which reduces the shock to the people inside which reduces the number of broken bones. In essence you want the new car to be wrecked, if its wrecked that means much of the collision energy was used in crumpling the frame of the car and not in jolting the passengers.
It's just one of those things car designers learnt from trial and error, like where to put a petrol tank so it doesn't explode and why not to use metal steering wheels.
I tried to find the European NCAP rating for the Malibu but wasn't able to so i have no idea on how safe the car is. But a while back on Top Gear they felt so safe about a 5 star NCAP car a presenter crashed it into a wall at 30/40MPH he came out without a scratch. Admittedly they'd wrecked the car, but the presenter didn't even have whiplash, you just wouldn't do that in a 50's car because chances are you'd end up with broken legs or internal injuries (generally from the steering wheel). Sure you were fine, but those changes happened because most people wern't ok.
As a driver, I think they need to point out that the idea is to NOT CRASH.
No kidding! In the US we have this mindset that the only way to be safe on the road is to buy a giant armored tank and sit four feet off the ground. And so they buy a huge SUV which has god-awful maneuverability and is many times more likely to roll over. And who cares about the risk you put other drivers in (or pedestrians -- SUVs are several times more likely to back over a child, for example).
If everyone focused on light, agile, and well-built, the roads would be a lot safer place. I think it's quite telling that there's far more variance in crash survivability between vehicles in a given class than between classes -- even within the same price bracket. If the Smart Fortwo can pass crash testing with that tiny little crumple zone, it's pathetic that so many vehicles don't do any better than they do.
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