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What a Black Box Data Dump Looks Like
An anonymous reader writes "Massachusetts Lt. Governor Tim Murray recently crashed his Ford Crown Victoria while reportedly traveling 108 mph. The car was pretty much shredded, but Murray walked away without major injuries. According to data from the car's black box, Murray and the Crown Vic experienced the equivalent of 40 gravities during the crash. The data contradicts the story he gave police. Maybe we should strap black boxes to all our politicians."
And what do you think the G in G-force stands for?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force
1G is equivalent to Earth-normal gravity (an object at rest on the planetary surface). 40G is equivalent to 40 times Earth-normal gravities. Gravities is commonly used when discussing force related to multiples of Earth-normal gravity.
I know people who get spare connectors from the junk yards and keep them plugged in so the car doesn't keep beeping at them about the seatbelt.
Why people go so far to avoid wearing a seat belt is beyond me.
You are missing the point. I DON'T have to say anything, or prove anything, It is my right to be silent and to not incriminate myself. It is their duty to prove me wrong. If they refuse to pay without reason/facts, then i will sue them. End of story.
You're right. You don't need to say or prove anything when you make a claim. They also don't need to pay your claim. If you believe that they do need to pay your claim and you sue them, then you WILL have to testify and give evidence. A lawsuit is a civil case. It is not a criminal case. The right not to testify only applies to criminal cases.
Please enjoy getting to pay to have your ass handed to you.
Your car must suck. 100 mph is not very extreme speed unless you car is from the 70s...
I think they buried the lead here... 100mph, sans seat-belt, and he walked away? That's goddamn incredible. I've seen first hand what an accident at 170km/h looks like (on the Autobahn) and walking away seems basically impossible.
You have to be impressed with the performance of the air bag system. The logging shows the seat belt unbuckled, and the air bag controller firing the first stage charge, then the second stage charge 10ms later as the system detects a severe crash.
The accelerations indicate the car first hit something that didn't stop the vehicle. Then it hit something hard, but either bounced off or broke through. That's the brief 40G spike. (Football players experience 40G spikes in normal play.) Then there's some banging around.
Understand that this is just the airbag's record. All the airbag controller has is some accelerometers and seat belt information. Airbag controllers record that data primarily to improve the performance of airbags. In the early years of airbags, there were a very few incidents where airbag deployment caused fatalities. (The worst it ever got was 0.5 fatality per million years of car registration.) This was essentially fixed (down to 0.01) by 2003. About a second of data is kept at all times, and shortly after the airbag fires, that data is locked in memory. Note that there's only 712ms of history here. The deceleration of 23MPH during airbag deployment is about typical for a crash that didn't involve hitting a solid obstacle like a bridge. The airbag has to fire at just the right time to be most effective, and the two-stage systems have to react properly to accidents of various types and severity. Here, the airbag system did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the driver walked away from the crash.
There's no vehicle computer data in the report. Vehicle data has more data sources and much longer term.
I don't think you understand what makes a car safe. You don't want something that is indestructable. You want something that dissipates a majority of a crash specifically by destructing. Previously, vehicles weren't designed to do this, and so the weakest area was the cabin. Now, they're designed to do that, and the cabin usually remans the most intact part of the vehicle, while most of the crash energy goes in to "shredding" (to use your terms) the rest of the vehicle. Ever seen an F1 crash? The reason they typically survive is that all that energy goes in to making the car practically disintegrate...