From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 17:23:15 MST
From: "Edwin Evans" <ektimo@pacbell.net>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2003 4:23 PM
Subject: RE: Fuel Efficient Cars (was Oil Economics)
> 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.
### This is such a strong argument against gas taxes: taxing gas is
exchanging *human lives* for a pile of cash at the IRS.
Reminds me why I so intensely distrust do-goody, green, save-the-planet
gobbledygook.
Rafal
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