When cars of similar safety, but different weight collide, the lighter sustains more and the heavier sustains less damage. But if you put concrete blocks in the lighter car (Yaris, for example) so it becomes heavier than the initially heavier car (Camry) and crash them together, will the Yaris sustain less damage and Camry sustain more? In theory, it should, since Yaris would be heavier now. (Assume the blocks inside the Yaris are securely attached to the body and it has greatly reinforced suspension so the ride height remains unaffected by the extra weight)
You'll get a structure that will likely fail to cope with the extra weight and severe internal injuries to occupants exposed to much greater forces.
There would be no occupants, it's just a crash test. But would the car itself sustain less damage? Or would it just collapse under all the weight?
I guess it would collapse, deceleration forces would be much greater than usual and the structure would simply fail to dissipate them. Keep in mind that damage is usually a sign of safety structures doing their job, absorbing impact forces that would otherwise reach the occupants unmitigated.
Fill a car with sand and you get this Its generally not that the lighter car sustains much if any more damage in most real world cases (weight differences don't tend to be large enough, safety cells are strong in modern cars), it's that the occupants face higher forces since the lighter car is likely to get pushed backwards, because deceleration from 30mph to -10mph (40mph difference) while other car only does 30mph to 10mph (20 mph difference). Obviously weight does have an effect on all this, lorries are a great example, have a head on collision with one and you are more or less done. But when the weight difference it 10-20% it's not so bad. Throw a Lotus Elise at a Range Rover and one car will come out a lot worse though, ignoring the whole issue of crushing the windscreen and roof due to driving over the Lotus. The whole smart car safety thing is a weird one. I have spoken to people who were under the impression that smart cars are the safest cars on the road. It seems to be a bit of a misconception. While it is impressive what Mercedes have achieved with such little crumple zone, a car with twice as much crumple zone (bonnet length) is going to be at a significant advantage when it comes to absorbing impact more slowly, and thus reducing forces on occupants. At the time when the Smart forTwo came out safety cells weren't quite so strong, and that was an area where the smart car excelled. But the occupants inside were subject to much higher forces in an impact, and even then the cell couldn't always deal with larger impacts. These days cars are pretty safe anyway, so the smart car doesn't really have much going for it in terms of safety. But if all you want is an economical city car, it's gonna keep you safe at city driving speeds no problem. As evidence of the strength of a commodity car (20 seconds in), driver walked away with relatively minor injuries. and from another angle
What do you guys think about the ford fiesta sportvan? I like that theyre still making them. Also a st version would be awesome espacially if it still looks like a base fiesta
yep, happened to my grandad's hyundai i20. He did a short trip and since the ECU was running it rich (hadn't achieved temp) there was excess fuel inside the cylinders. Overnight this A/F mixture condensed (as it got colder) and the sparkplugs got wet. So when starting it the next day, it didn't, and instead of running the battery dry, we just got the AA (or greenflag, can't remember) to see what happened. They put the battery on a jumpstarter thing to stop it from draining and we kept cranking it. --- Post updated --- Why would you bother with that? Just get a Caravan that has at least decent aerodynamics, and with wheels on anyway.
Breaking news - a minivan rear seat kills a man. http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2018/04/teen-killed-folding-third-row-seat-honda-odyssey/
Someone clearly enjoyed their commute today. I like the paint too Makes the Golf GTI and Focus parked next to it look like SUV's.
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-takata-recall-20180423-story.html Yet another death caused by a Takata airbag. A lot of cars with them are still on the road. While in the US, Australia and Japan the recalls are in full force, not much is heard about them in Europe. Don't cars in Europe have defective airbags? I tried checking our 2008 BMW 1-series by VIN, but got "BMW of America doesn't recognise this VIN" as a result (no shit). By the way, that one BMW was totaled in a crash, but airbags didn't deploy for some reason. Is there some way to find out whether your EUDM car is affected and whether it has been repaired? Do European dealers even bother replacing the airbags if asked to?
Honda of Europe recalled. Even friends 2004 car who's factory airbag would have naturally expired by now anyway was repaired under warranty
It's just been over two weeks since that happened. It's sad what all took place. Made me question Honda's safety standards. If I ever do get a 2nd gen Honda Odyssey, I'm absolutely going to tear out the third row seat, which is where he unfortunately got trapped. I wouldn't want to be doing something like unpacking/loading groceries, and then the seat decides to go all Final Destination on me. It's disgusting how this whole airbag scandal even started. From what I heard, because of their crappy decisions, Takata is single handedly responsible for one of the biggest automotive recalls in history. Thankfully Takata went out of business. IMO they shouldn't be in business if they're going to make the kind of decisions that endanger people's lives. Airbags are designed to help protect passengers in the instance of a crash, not explode and launch shrapnel at them and kill them, all with the slightest impact. That's another thing I heard, those airbags will explode with even minor fender benders. After hearing about that, I checked to see if Ford and Dodge used them on the Crown Victoria and Stratus respectively. Their names didn't turn up on the lists I saw, so I'm relieved that I don't have to deal with that.
To be fair to Honda, it's the first ever death caused by one of those seats and there is an incredibly large number of them out there. It's likely that the mechanism was broken which caused it to behave in a defective way. Otherwise you would be seeing a lot more of this type of issue, since I am sure they aren't the first one to lean over the 3rd row. Whether the seat was known by the family to be defective or was defective is not yet known. Certainly an unpleasant way to die. To my knowledge, air bags do not decide when they go off. That is controlled by the sensors fitted to the car and probably something that the car manufacturer has control over. Generally they are not designed to go off easily, since they don't want them to deploy when a car hits a kerb if it is about to hit a wall half a second later. Depending on the brand, some more modern cars only set off the airbags that they think you need. So in a front impact they will only set off frontal protection airbags, this means that if you get T-boned after the initial accident they can still deploy the side ones to protect in that type of impact. Now obviously Takata didn't intend for the airbags to behave in the way they did. But that sort of thing is clearly negligence on their behalf for designing them poorly. However, this doesn't mean that the car manufacturers are off the hook, had they tested them properly they might have been able to spot where the weaknesses of the design were.
Well, when you get componenents manufactured by 3rd parties, you usually require certificates of compliance. Suppliers usually take full responsibility for faulty parts, testing is all on them.
Legally speaking, sure. But internally you should have your own testing. If you don't test the components, you are gonna get the crappiest components, cause 3rd party component makers will usually try to cut corners wherever possible in order to improve profits. Therefore any quality brand should test components that are sent to them. And continually do so to ensure the supplier doesn't silently switch to lower grade componentry and to ensure that all batches received conform to what is expected.
Judging by the sheer number of manufacturers involved in the Takata Airbag scandal, this is wishful thinking at best. No internal testing took place whatsoever, or such a blatant issue caused by inept cost-cutting measures would have been spotted way sooner.
Which is why its worrying. Car companies crash test their own vehicles, these products are tested at some stage. The fact that no one properly analysed the performance of something so critical to their customers safety is ridiculous. At the end of the day, they decided to buy from this manufacturer, they accepted this standard of product and fitted it to their cars. If it doesn't work or causes injury, their hands aren't clean. But having said that, the number of times car companies have been caught doing shady stuff to lower costs, I am honestly not that surprised. Ford has been caught with glaring issues in their cars before, yet they decided it was cheaper to pay off the families of the deceased than actually fix the problem. With the current gen Mustang, they didn't bother to fit seat belt pre tensioners to the EU spec vehicle, because they didn't think it would be popular enough for Euro NCAP to test, so figured they wouldn't get called out on it. As such, when the EU spec mustang got tested, it got a 2 star safety rating, because they didn't fit equipment that was standard in the US version, hoping that customers would assume the US safety ratings were valid for EU models: https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/ford/mustang/26063 Both of those features are standard on basically all cars. The US model was fitted with them, so Ford has no excuse for not fitting them here. --- Post updated --- In more Ford news, Turns out they don't plan on selling many more cars in the US. Its not just the Focus RS that is on the way out...
they did the same with the pinto and 2wd bronco II both had major flaws found in testing that they never fixed. On one hand it sucks that they aren't selling cars/hatches here anymore but truthfully here in New England the only sedans I have seen are imports or cops and almost all hatches are imports except for a few sparks
