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Saving Gas Via Underpowered Death Traps
Harperdog writes with this excerpt from a story at Miller-McCune:
"Yes, it's true that the fuel-economy standards the U.S. has been using cost lives. Economist Mark Jacobson has estimated that for every mile-per-gallon we raise the standards, 149 traffic fatalities occur per year. That would mean 1,490 deaths if the standards were raised from, say, 30 miles-per-gallon to 40. But this doesn't have to be the case. It's possible, Jacobson has concluded, to increase fuel efficiency without also decreasing safety. And if government officials are smart, they'll tailor the regulations behind the new standards to do this."
"And if government officials are smart, "
That is the biggest if in the world!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
That's some of the worst crap I've ever read about saving fuel. Small diesel engines (ala VW) have the ability to get 50+mpg and still have neck-snapping torque. Underpower death-traps my hiney.
is not already costing drivers of big cars more in terms of liability premiums.
Nullius in verba
Not to be brutal, but that number's pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of all of this. It's a tiny fraction of total traffic fatalities, which means we can more than make up the difference looking for other forms of safety improvement.
The highways deliver us all kinds of goods which prolong life. They also deliver traffic fatalities.
One is easy to measure. The other isn't.
This tendancy to focus on the metric that's easily measured is a problem in a lot of places...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
As TFA states, the "deathtrap" is due to the smaller cars being smashed to a pulp when they run into a gas-guzzling behemoth. People are buying big cars not because they need them or that they like guzzling fuel. And maybe not even necessarily because the bigger cars have more "oomph". But also because "driving a tank = I'm safer, especially from other tanks on the road".
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
Economist Mark Jacobson has estimated that for every mile-per-gallon we raise the standards, 149 traffic fatalities occur per year.
OR
Everyone with a brain has estimated that massive, unnecessarily heavy and powerful gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs driven by distracted buffoons kill people on the road.
Also, the report and the curiously straight-line graph comes from:
The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization, established in 1983. Our goal is to develop and promote private, free-market alternatives to government regulation and control, solving problems by relying on the strength of the competitive, entrepreneurial
private sector.
The key bit from the linked story:
“Having separate fuel economy standards for cars and trucks encourages people to continue to use trucks as if they were cars,” he said. “They buy a truck, but they drive it as if it were a car. They don’t necessarily need the bed or the four-wheel drive.”
It seems that the problem is not fuel efficiency standards leading to under-powered death traps. Rather, the problem is size disparity driven by misuse of large vehicles. To me, that's a different story.
The eternal problem of correlation and causation. Where is the research that supports the hypothesis? Is it possible that the population growth is the one that is causing more cars to be sold (and economy pushes for better efficiency standards) and therefore more accidents?
Is it also that more kids start driving at younger ages? I don't see the clear causation of fuel efficiency vs. death toll, but certainly I see a correlation.
Is this a trick to make insurance companies charge me more for fuel efficient vehicles?
They should ban motorbike, pushbikes and especially pedestrians.
Did you know that the death rate for pedestrians is 100%
... what is the estimated number of deaths caused by pollution in the USA alone? and worldwide?
No car is safe. Even a large suv can be a death trap in crashes. Small cars can be designed to be just as safe with the use of crumple zones and air bags.
There are a lot of smart people in government and usually the fewer people involved in a decision the better the decision will be. None of us is as dumb as all of us and Congress is a committee of 528 people. I have a hard enough time getting five people to decide on anything at work much less a Byzantine committee of 538 preening attention whores who are legally allowed to take bribes to stay in power.
Because road wear is proportional to the fourth power of the weight of the vehicle, make the 4,000 lbs SUV owner pay 16 times as much in taxes as the 2,000 lbs small car owner. Pretty soon we'll see fewer SUVs on the roads, and all because of a fair, well-justified tax as opposed to new, arbitrary regulations.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Wow, a lesson in design tradeoffs. You can't have a large comfortable, safe car with several air bags, an enormous crumple zone with decent acceleration that gets 40 MPG. One of the best way to increase fuel economy is to move less car around, and, all things being equal, a heavier car is better. (That is assuming we are comparing well-designed cars.)
Around here, we could save tons of lives by having better ROADs. Most roads here have no space berm off to the side (just trees), tons of random curves, hills, blind spots, etc. They'd save tons of lives (at huge cost, no doubt) if they straightened and flattened the roads and made them a little wider. Not to mention some type of rumble strip to warn people when they cross the center line. (They have those in California, but the dots don't work when you have to plow the roads. They can make indents, but that appears to cost too much.) My theory is that Pennsylvania just paves over whatever deer path was there without regard to any sort of engineering principles (including drainage, where the lower roads carved in a hill serve as a river during storms.)
I don't know, but it works for me.
Example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtxd27jlZ_g&feature=player_embedded
Newer cars are safer, and aren't 'death traps'.
While disparity of weight has an impact, the the energy is diverted is inportant as well.
And remember, if two car travelling at 50 MPH have a head on collision, the force on each driver is 50MPH then adjusted fro mass differences.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You prefer monarchy? Any way some statistics if someone wants to read them: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/motor_vehicle_accidents_and_fatalities.html
Watch out for those buses and delivery trucks. The ones that tend to run through red lights because they know they're going to fast to stop. Even if every other vehicle is a tiny car that it would take 2 of to hold my family that fits fine in my SUV and van, you'd still lose against mass transit vehicles in an accident. Not to mention the 18-wheel or higher semis going 65 mph down the 10-lane beside you.
Except the safety features are regulated. Basically it's a fixed variable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If that were true, everyone would be buying Oldsmobiles. Those things are big, heavy tanks. No, people buy SUVs because they better allow you to see over and around other vehicles. When half the vehicles on the road are SUVs, drivers in cars are at a significant disadvantage.
By being closer to the average height of traffic, you're not just making yourself safer. You're also making everyone around you safer because you can react more quickly to problems up ahead. In larger vehicles, you are also more easily seen by other vehicles because of your larger overall footprint, which, again, makes everyone safer.
What we need are strict standards for vehicle height consistency, and the standard needs to move towards the size of small SUVs, not cars. And those laws should apply to SUVs and light trucks, not just cars and minivans. And so should bumper height laws, but that's another issue.... Uniformity is a virtue when it comes to traffic safety. Outliers on either side of the norm put people at risk.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Not really.
Here is a Bel Air - also know for being a 'boat'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtxd27jlZ_g&feature=player_embedded
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Tanks kill people. Fact.
You could just as easy turn the whole thing around and argue that the Overweight Gas Guzzlers are doing the damage therefore they are causing the problem.
[The Universe] has gone offline.
Yes, lowering the speed limit or at least enforcing existing limits, would reduce fatalities, attract smaller engines, make larger vehicles more fuel-efficient, and optimize traffic flow [pdf]. So I'm counting four birds with one stone.
Another "two birds, one stone" solution is to make it illegal to pass on the right. Then slower traffic would always need to be in the right lane in order to avoid impeding traffic, and that would (1) make it easier for smaller engined cars to come up to speed on freeway onramps, and (2) separate slow traffic from fast traffic.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Or we could just ban SUVs. That would achieve the same goal and not make me drive something that cannot corner for shit.
It mostly is illegal to pass on the right, the problem is slower traffic often fails to move to the right lane.
The biggest joke here is the assumptions that 1) small, light cars can't be safe and 2) that deaths in small light cars won't reduce as we pull big, heavy cars off the roads.
1) Is easily disproved by looking at an extreme case or two – have a crash in a 600kg Formula 1 car, and you'll very very very likely survive – hell, have a crash at 200mph in one and you'll very very very likely walk out of it.
2) Is easily disproved by looking at countries where small and light cars are already the norm. In the UK for example, the death rate from car accidents was 5.4 per 100,000 population, while in the US it was 14.3 per 100,000 population
Higher taxes - combined with cheap and effective mass transit - does indeed reduce fuel use. Raising taxes is easy, providing the alternative to driving is the hard part.
Opportunity cost. The economic waste removed from transportation costs will probably save more lives if spent elsewhere.
Indeed, I do not prefer monarchy. I prefer a system that works, where people can take risks and make decisions backed up by data. There are both government agencies and areas of the private sector where this occurs but we should strive ever forward and our goal should be smarter decisions balancing risk and reward with as little standing in the way of good decision making as possible.
Yes, the summary is biased. As the article points out, it is in fact the large cars that are dangerous-- they are, however, dangerous to the smaller cars.
Making cars smaller doesn't result in more deaths-- unless you have large cars on the road as well. It is the larger cars that are killing people. (and the bogus statistic comes from the "National Center for Policy Analysis"-- read: political action group paid to shill for oil companies.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There were more fatalities in 1972 and less cars, but I guess that is a cool car. http://blog.american.com/2010/09/the-good-old-days-are-now-trickle-down-automotive-safety/ Slashdot has been invaded by garbage or propaganda submissions. Is someone getting paid for this crap?
In the UK for example, the death rate from car accidents was 5.4 per 100,000 population, while in the US it was 14.3 per 100,000 population
It's also much more difficult to actually get a driving license in the UK. The written and road tests are more difficult than in North America. If you drive in the UK it's quite evident that most of the drivers on the road seem more skilled and more 'situationally aware' than their North American counterparts.
Wrong. Higher fuel taxes result directly in higher fuel prices. We've seen over and over again that every time fuel prices peak, people start selling their jacked-up pickup trucks and SUVs and buying smaller cars. And when fuel prices are dirt-cheap, everyone buys the biggest SUV they can find.
Oil company profits are only one part of fuel prices; a very large chunk of the price you pay per gallon at the pump is federal and state fuel taxes. The government basically has the ability to set fuel prices, within certain margins, simply by changing the taxes.
similar sentiment here in the uk where people think big old volvos are safer than moder cars.. not true...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBDyeWofcLY
hmmm.
A while back (15 years? 25 years?) when the Pinto was still a car, Ford or somebody did an experiment (IIRC it was in Popular Mechanics or some such). First they took a new Pinto and a new Fairlane and crashed them together. The Pinto was, of course, a pancake along with anyone who would have been in it. Then they took two more but filled various body cavities in the Pinto with rigid urethane foam. This time, the Pinto broke even with the Fairlane - nobody in either car would have died.
So just basic methods _can_ have a very good effect.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Odd that making it more rigid helped - usually the problem is actually that the car doesn't crumple up enough, and transfers too much energy into the occupants, not that it crumpled up too much.
I'm as green as the next Liberal, but I've got 3 kids in child seats (we need three rows of seating) and I make lots of runs to home depot. We don't own an SUV for safety or to see "over and around" other vehicles, but because its big and can haul a lot of stuff and people. *My* car is an eco friendly car (SUV is my wife's car) because I just use it to commute, but as much as I hate monster big SUVs, sometimes they do have justifiable uses and IMHO, that's never to "be a tank".
I'd prefer if you made my SUV as light and fuel efficient as possible. Carrying around 6000 lbs of steel isn't what will save you, modern safety features will.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
What's with the 'This.' meme on Slashdot recently? It's totally pointless filler and a redundant word, sentence and paragraph all in one. Well done there.
This.
I was just going to post this video as well.
I show this to people who cling to the "old cars are safer" bit. Believe me, I love, LOVE classic cars, but the plain truth is that newer cars are safer. My fave things to point out in that crash are 1) the A Pillar collapsing, 2) The dummy doesn't hit the dashboard, the dashboard and steering column fly up to hit the dummy and 3) if this car were a few years older, there wouldn't be any safety glass in it. Yes that '59 has a fully boxed frame in it, but the level of intrusion is grotesque compared to the opposing car.
Something to note is that small cars colliding with small cars is still safer than small cars colliding with SUVs. SUVs which (interestingly) aren't always safer either. There will always be other things for small cars to crash into, such as tractor trailers, trains, buildings and bridge posts, but the more properly engineered small cars there are on the road, the general safety will increase, IMUAEO*
*In My Unscientific Armchair Engineer Opinion
do() || do_not();
The asshat who wrote the first study sited in TFA is a shill for ExxonMobil. The article hinges it's entire premis on the results of the second scholarly work which is a month old draft of an unpublished, unpeer-reviewed, unproven idea for an econometric model to analyze policy effects on on safety (translate: probably not even close to accurate). In fact, the article states as it's first line "Research confirms that increasing fuel economy standards does cost lives on the road.", as if this is proven fucking fact now. Stuff like this on slashdot makes me want to punch people in the face. Few bother to question or even read linked articles but love to go all modern jackass on meta shit that doesn't even have anything to do with the subject.
http://www.questionablecontent.net/random/winfail.png pretty much covers it.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
1. It's gotten so bad, we tend to have suppression of majorities. Try being white or a Christian in America today. You're getting attacked left and right (no pun intended).
Oh please. Why do Christian fundamentalists always think they're being persecuted, when they're the majority and have the most political power? The Republican party is all about kowtowing to fundamentalist Christians. No one is "attacking" you, you just hate it that you're not able to oppress homosexuals like you used to.
2. That's why we were supposed to have States' rights, so that the locals could do what's best for them.
You can't have States' rights with a Federal government; it always tends toward concentration of power at the top. This question was settled in 1865. You need to have a Confederacy, like the Swiss, if you want real States' rights. However, for various historical reasons that didn't work out for us (mainly because we were trying to hold together two parts of the country which were just too different), which is why we abandoned the Articles of Confederation and wrote the Constitution instead, which doomed us to Federalism. The only way to change that now is to overthrow the government and make a new confederation, hopefully modeled after the Swiss.
Wrong. The difference is that now engineers know how to design a car to protect its passengers from a crash, and they're more motivated to do so.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Typically a good design has an energy absorbing crumple zone around a rigid passenger compartment.
"... filled various body cavities in the Pinto with rigid urethane foam."
Without seeing the article it's not clear what they did, but urethane foam would also be an energy absorber when it is deformed. It is possible to create polyurethanes with vastly differing flexibility. When they are foamed, their properties are vastly different. Rigid polyurethane foam is the type that is used for insulation (in refrigerators for example) and flexible polyurethane foam, 'foam rubber' is the type that is used to cushion seating.
Agreed. I remember several years ago, some studies were done, regarding bumper heights. In these videos of crash tests, the bumpers always seem to match, or nearly match. Passenger vehicles seem to have been standardized, ages ago, regarding bumper height. But, pickups, SUV's, and other vehicles such as delivery trucks all have higher bumpers. Meaning, their bumpers ride up over your bumper, at the least slamming into your radiator and engine, or at the worst, coming directly at you, through the windshield.
I've not actually witnessed crashes of this type, but I have seen the results. It's ugly. If safety is the primary issue, then all vehicles on the road would have a standard bumper height. Your energy absorption technology is pretty well meaningless in a situation where that absorption never comes into play. Even class 8 trucks - those big 18 wheelers - could have improved bumpers on the trailers. It's a no-brainer that those big F-350 pickups with lift kits should be outlawed.
As has been pointed out many times, the vast majority of trucks like an F-350 are almost never used for their designed purpose. They are status symbols, and phallic symbols. That is even more true when those trucks have over sized tires, and lift kits. People who actually WORK a truck don't need, or want, lift kits. Instead, they need and demand stability. The lower the center of gravity, the more stable that truck will be.
It only makes sense that pickup bumper heights are required by law to match the vast majority of small, fuel efficient passenger vehicles.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
a:) In the UK it's perfectly normal to drive long distances between major cities for things like business trips or weekends visiting relatives, e.g. London to Glasgow, a good 7-8 hours with a couple of short breaks, where as in the US it seems it would be more common to fly in similar situations.
b:) In Continental Europe, train services and public transport are far superior in just about every respect and have been the envy of the British for the last thirty years or so. In recent times things have got worse, with prices for longer train journeys reaching almost ridiculous levels if bought on the day of travel. Though in the cities buses can be pretty good, in rural areas they are awful, unless you like 1 hr journeys on bumpy roads that cost the same as the equivalent direct 20 min drive in your car.
c:) North American towns and smaller cities are far better equipped with local shops and services than their equivalents in the UK, particularly in more rural and "satellite town" areas. In the US and Canada I'd constantly be amazed by what was on offer in small towns that would in the UK just be villages with a single newsagent/minimarket, maybe a post office and a few pubs. People in the UK in places like this are used to driving 20 mins+ to a town/city in the area that's larger to get more than the most basic services or go to the supermarket. Both supermarkets and larger shopping malls in the UK are, on average, quite a lot more crowded than their equivalents in the US and Canada. My theory is that this is due to the higher costs of land, rent, and running a business on average here to due to our great population density, minimum wage laws and many restrictions on new development, leading to a consolidation of businesses into fewer, more concentrated areas - but it results in more 20-40 min drives for the significant semi-rural population.
d:) One reason why there are less cars per person in the UK, it's really expensive in the UK to keep a car road legal compared to other countries. Insurance and road tax add up to £600-£1500 per year for most drivers, for a fairly modest type of car. Insurance varies hugely depending on how sporty/big engined the car is and how young you are. You don't see 17-20 year olds driving SUVs / Jap sports coupes/ sports cars nearly as commonly as in the US or other countries because the insurance would be so expensive (it might not even be possible to buy insurance for some car/driver combinations). I think that's one reason why fatal accidents are lower here.
A past acquaintance from school posted pictures of this horrible wreck they were in. The car was fucking annihilated from the side. It looked like a jacked up fork lift monster truck had rolled over them. I was worried about them so I texted them to see if they were alright.
Yep, their truck wasn't damaged much. The truck was a huge jacked up Ford. The bumper hit at about head level. The only reason BOTH people in the car they broadsided weren't decapitated was because they saw it coming and got under the car. Firefighters had to cut them out. The speed was 30mph and their side impact airbags went off.
Then they complained about all the undercarriage damage their truck had received and the fact that their suspension was now fucked up. While they all walked away with no injuries, and the people in the car had lengthy hospital stays.
I hope the people that got hit sued the ever-loving shit out of them for driving an unsafe vehicle.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Yeah, that '59 Bel Air has a the infamous X-frame, which neither particularly resilient nor completely typical of old car design (which is the same as current SUV and pickup design).
The relevant issue that makes something a "death trap" is passenger cabin intrusion.
The Malibu, like all modern cars is designed to prevent cabin intrusion in an accident -- that is, parts of the car are designed so that if they are destroyed in an accident, they will not come into the cabin or damage its structural integrity.
That Bel Air has a solid metal steering wheel, steering column, and tiny narrow roof pillars. This makes the car look beautiful and evoke the classic styling of that era, but it does precisely nothing to protect the passenger cabin or the passengers in an accident. 1959 was the first year that seat belts were even offered as standard equipment on a Chevrolet!
The other thing that many do not realize is that both of those cars are in the same weight class, ~3500 pounds. Much of 1959's weight is in the sheet metal styling cues and chrome and heavy iron-block engine: the smallest engine available was the 3.8 liter 6-cylinder Blueflame (125 hp!). The Malibu, on the other hand, gains much more of its weight from passenger comfort and safety system: not only is the car itself much smaller, and has slighter body panels, but the largest engine, an all aluminum 3.6 liter 6-cylinder LY7 engine produces over a hundred more horsepower (252 hp), and weighs significantly less.
The only deathtraps on the road are the big old cars, and the trucks and SUVs which are patterned off of them mechanically.