Thursday, April 16, 2009

Spend lives, Save gas

Take your pick.

17 comments:

Laura said...

Love this comment:

My conclusion is that is the larger cars are the hazard.

— VernonK


People are just hilarious.

Mom said...

Vernon K apparently missed the part in the article where they explained, at length, that the test used mid-sized cars, not large ones. Also, I wonder if Vernon K would be so sure that the larger cars were the hazards if he considered what would happen if he drove that Smart car into a tree or a light pole at 40 mph. Wouldn't be pretty.

Watch those videos. They are really quite scary.

Spongy Penguin said...

Maybe she meant "larger than smart cars."

And what would happen if you drove one of those things into a thin, inanimate object, I wonder?

Luke Murphy said...

Jesse, I don't know exactly, but I think in general a larger car is safer. I think per pound the advantage of the increased structural integrity you get from adding more size to a car outweighs the disadvantage of the increased inertia.

Those videos are seriously scary.

Caleb said...

I'm regularly amazed that I've been driving small cars for 9 years now and am still alive. What are the odds?

Dad said...

Caleb, 94,573 to 1.

They should just ban all cars that are bigger than mine.

Dad said...

I've been driving small cars, generally, for almost 40 years without it coming into play. Luke, however, may owe his life to the structural integrity of the Villager.

Dad said...

And I love small cars. And big cars. But I'm sick to death of people ripping SUVs. Smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient cars mean more deaths.

Laura said...

I loved the villager. What a car! Thank goodness for Luke.

Family:

Anna, Jason and I are going to Boston tonight to visit Jenny and we will be going to Fenway on Saturday. Expect pictures in a couple days! Thank goodness Beckett appealed his suspension or we wouldn't have seen him pitch!

Mom said...

Those videos made me re-live Luke's Villager crash -- and for that matter, Laura, your accident last fall, which was similar in some ways to the video accidents. (larger car, smaller car; two cars; moderate speeds.) If your little car had been a flimsy thing like that "Smart" car rather than a sturdy and relatively heavy Subaru, the story might have turned out quite differently.

Mom said...

Have a great time in Boston!! We do want a blog post . . .

Dad said...

Oh, so a certain memeber of your party is back from Ireland?

The things you find out when you go out to eat at Lewis's.

Caleb said...

"Luke, however, may owe his life to the structural integrity of the Villager."
He absolutely may. But at the same time, a car with a lower center of gravity, more responsive handling, and a shorter stopping distance might not have gone off the road in the first place.
"If your little car had been a flimsy thing like that "Smart" car rather than a sturdy and relatively heavy Subaru, the story might have turned out quite differently."
By the exact same logic, if the other driver had been driving a Ford Expedition, the story might have turned out quite differently. The driver would have been fine, though. Safer!

Mom said...

Caleb, of course a car's sheer size is not all that matters in terms of its safety. Little cars may be more maneuverable, big cars may be more top-heavy and likely to roll, etcetera. But those flimsy little toy cars in the videos carry the size issue to an unnecessary extreme. Even if being in a bigger car doesn't guarantee safety, a person in a Smart car is really maximizing the risk of coming out at the wrong end of a crash. For one thing, by design, the car is smaller and lighter than pretty much everything else on the road (including your car), so it's almost certain that anything that hits it will have a size and weight advantage. For another, as those videos illustrate, whatever safety design efforts may have been made to overcome the weight disadvantage are inadequate. Look at the short nose on the Smart car. Where is the crumple zone? In the driver's seat! Your car would give you a much greater chance of surviving a similar impact. I'll bet you've got a nice heavy steel cage around the passenger compartment that would have stopped the hood of that Mercedes from whacking right through the engine compartment of that Smart car and into the driver's legs.

In other words, nobody is saying that small cars are by definition unsafe. I would much rather drive a smaller car than a larger car myself, and I'm more confident of my ability to drive a small car safely than I am with a larger car. However, what those videos show is that beyond a certain point, it stops making sense to subtract size and weight from a car to attain fuel efficiency. The escalating safety risk isn't worth the tradeoff.

Mom said...

And the car that hit Laura's was an SUV, by the way. I don't know what kind and it probably wasn't an Expedition. Still, think about the front bumper of that SUV whacking into Laura's driver's door inches from where she was sitting. I for one am quite glad she was in a car that, although quite small, had heavy side protection built in. (I may be wrong but I believe Subaru was the first or one of the first car manufacturers to design cars with protective cages around the passenger compartments and "crumple zones" built in elsewhere to deflect shock. Volvo, too, I think. Back in the day, for that reason, Subaru had the reputation of being one of the safest cars on the road.)

Luke Murphy said...

"By the exact same logic, if the other driver had been driving a Ford Expedition, the story might have turned out quite differently. The driver would have been fine, though. Safer!"

Well when I buy a car, I'll be thinking about how safe it makes ME, not the other people on the road. Anyway I would still contend that a highway full of SUVs is safer than a highway full of small cars, and certainly safer than these Smart cars.

Caleb said...

Mom, those are all good points, and I don't really disagree with anything you said. I didn't actually know that it was an SUV that hit Laura, and there are some obvious and serious safety issues with Smart cars (which the video clearly shows) and their ilk. Honestly, most of them probably apply to my car too. I have a crumple zone, but it's pretty insignificant.

I tend to bristle when people refer to SUVs as "safer." They're exempt from passenger car bumper standards, which means that when they're rear-ended by (or when they rear-end) an actual passenger car, they do a lot more damage than another car would. They also have blind spots the size of, well, small cars. They're often driven by people who can't handle a car that size, and probably my biggest complaint: They instill a false sense of security in their drivers in bad weather, even (and especially) the ones that aren't 4WD. Also, the points I made earlier. I DON'T want to ban them, or require every car to be the size of my car, and it's not about gas mileage for me, at all...I just don't like them. SUV drivers do stupid things on the road at the same rate that everyone else does, but they stand a much better chance of killing someone else when they do.

Well when I buy a car, I'll be thinking about how safe it makes ME, not the other people on the road.I have three reactions to this, and I can't decide which one I want to go with. Two are silly. Here they all are:

1.) And I'll surround my apartment building with bear traps and motion-sensing flame throwers. It'll be safer for me, so there's no problem.

2.) Go for it. I'll do the same thing, and start driving one of these. It won't be my fault when I don't see you on my right (DAMN that thing has a humongous blind spot), and crush your measly SUV in my treads. You should have upgraded sooner!

3.) (The serious response) That's fine, and that's what most reasonable people do. Hence the SUV prevalence. I'll do the same thing - which is why I'll choose a car that I can steer around things, that stops faster, and that hugs the road. It'll have airbags, and an excellent safety rating (and it won't be a Smart car). But it'll be bought with the goal of avoiding accidents, not surviving them at the expense of others.

Anyway I would still contend that a highway full of SUVs is safer than a highway full of small cars, and certainly safer than these Smart cars.Maybe. But only until someone invents the double-SUV, and half the population starts driving those. Then we're back to square one.