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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.
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!
It had the straight six, which you can see on the interior shot shoving the dashboard back violently. The straight 6 engines in those cars offered no protection in an offset crash, and just smashed back through the dash killing the occupants, who were dead anyway.
/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
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.
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."
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?
There are details of European crash tests at http://www.euroncap.com/
As al 'almost' example of what you are looking for, please compare the results for a Ford Escort (this model introduced 1990) http://www.euroncap.com/tests/ford_escort_1999/33.aspx vs a current model Ford Focus (introduced 2004) http://www.euroncap.com/tests/ford_focus_2004/204.aspx
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
They collide them at an angle because that's the most typical head-on collision scenario. Full head-on collisions are rare.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
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."
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...
Good thing Bush isn't around any more - he'd buy into it.
I have a hard time believing that you can predict that. Why do you think the Bel-Air's block would "cut through the Malibu" instead of cutting through the Bel-Air's cabin, like it essentially did in this test?
After all, I am strangely colored.
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.
The straight 6 engines in those cars offered no protection in an offset crash, and just smashed back through the dash killing the occupants, who were dead anyway.
Fucking classic-car-driving zombies...
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.
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.
Marty, he's in a '46 Ford, we're in a DeLorean. He'd rip through us like we were tin foil.
Well, IANA Physicist, but I'd bet that they don't make bumpers like the ones you describe, because they're so rigid. The energy of the collision would be telegraphed through the bumper, into the frame, and eventually into the driver and passengers. Modern bumpers absorb more of that energy (when they get crushed), and that much less of it gets into the cockpit.
It might make sense to swap out a modern bumper for a steel monster if you know you're going to have a minor crash (let the passengers absorb the energy and save money on bumper replacement), but most of us don't have that kind of foresight.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
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".
Then they wouldn't mind being killed a little more would they?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
Do you ever worry that your feelings are trying to get you killed?
1998 Toyota Corolla - 40mph into side of truck that turned left in front of me for no apparent reason. Drove the car to a parking lot and got out without a scratch. Car totalled.
2001 Toyota Echo - car driving horizontally to traffic plowed into my left front bumper sending me across a lane of traffic and hitting a concrete highway divider twice. Tires, were resting against the divider. Got out without a scratch. Car totalled.
Now granted I have bad luck. But my experience is telling me your feelings are trying to get you killed. No matter how good a driver you are if someone decides to turn left at exactly the right moment or drive against the flow of traffic, there's very little you can do evasively.
Your physics makes no sense. Why is this modded informative? The ground is not a magical reference point!
If two cars travelling in opposite directions at 40 MPH slam into each other, that's exactly equivalent, in terms of energy dissipation and momentum transfer, to one car travelling at 80MPH slamming into a stationary vehicle. Each vehicle, in its own reference frame, sees another vehicle travelling at 80MPH.
Think about it: if two identical cars crash, and one is stationary, then for a moment (before they come to a stop due to friction against the pavement) they'll be moving together at half the speed of the moving car before the crash. One car goes from 80MPH to 40MPH (40MPH difference); the other goes from 0MPH to 40MPH (40MPH difference).
This is exactly equivalent to going from 40MPH to 0MPH (40MPH difference).
When you're working out simple kinematics like this you should be starting with momentum, which is linear with velocity. You can work out how much energy is released afterwards; you'll see that it works out:
(1/2) * (1500kg) * (36m/s) ^ 2 = 972 kJ - Amount of kinetic energy in the moving car at 80MPH
(1/2) * (1500kg) * (18m/s) ^ 2 * 2 = 486 kJ - Amount of kinetic energy left after the crash: 2 cars at 40MPH
972 kJ - 486 kJ = 486 kJ - Amount of kinetic energy dissipated in the crash
(1/2) * (1500kg) * (18m/s) ^ 2 * 2 = 486 kJ - Amount of kinetic energy in 2 cars at 40MPH
(1/2) * (1500kg) * (0m/s) ^ 2 * 2 = 0 kJ - Amount of kinetic energy left after the crash: in 2 cars at 0MPH
486 kJ - 0 kJ = 486 kJ - Amount of kinetic energy dissipated in the crash
(Yes, kinetic energy is 1/2 mv^2, not mv^2!)