From: Edwin Evans (ektimo@pacbell.net)
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 14:23:26 MST
Brain Atkins wrote:
> which is worth more safety-wise in a collision: modern
> safety design and airbags or simple mass?
Mass. It's not even close. Even if both cars are bigger, it still helps.
--- http://www.scienceservingsociety.com/pubs/AmericanScientistTEXT.htm: When a vehicle crashes, its size is the attribute of the vehicle that most affects the occupants' injury risk. Larger vehicles offer more protection in crashes mainly because they are heavier. Their larger dimensions also provide increased protection. Relations between injury risk and vehicle weight are among the most reliably established findings in traffic-safety research. When a car crashes into another that is twice as heavy, the driver in the lighter car is 12 times as likely to die as the driver in the heavier car. But such large weight disparities are rare. The most common weight disparity in a U.S. two-car crash is for one car to be 20 percent heavier than the other. In that case, the driver of the lighter car is twice as likely to die as the driver of the heavier car. -- If cars of the same mass crash into each other, each will undergo identical speed changes. However, the risk decreases as the common mass of the vehicles increases (Figure 7, right). This effect is not because of the mass but because heavier vehicles are generally larger. The large size provides more crushable space and therefore more time for the occupants to decelerate. -- In 1966, the United States had the lowest traffic fatality rate in the world; in the years since then, despite an obsessive focus on vehicle safety or arguably because of it, the U.S. ranking in the world has steadily slipped. The focus on vehicle factors -- factors over which they have no control -- has encouraged American drivers to regard safety as something out of their control. The American focus on airbags is one example of this. These were mandated by a lawyer-led safety agency that claimed safety benefits far in excess of published technical estimates [9%] and ignored technical information documenting their harmful effects. Before a drug can be prescribed in the United States, it must meet two basic standards -- efficacy and safety. Airbags were not shown to meet either, but they were not merely offered to the public, their installation was required. Now, the United States is the only country in the world in which it is illegal to purchase a new car without a device that is known to increase the net harm to women (Dalmotas et al. 1996) and to increase fatality risk in children (Glass et al. 2000). --- Note, the traffic-safety expert who wrote this article also happens to be my Dad. Buckle up, -Edwin
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