Why do think newer cars are so fragile ? Can you recall a time when vehicles were actually durable ?

Modern cars are fragile so that they fail in an accident—your uncle’s accident at 50mph would have been fatal. Your mom’s accident at 50mph would have been survivable.

It’s a trade off, but if you make them strong enough to survive a 10–15mph crash, they don’t crush fast enough in a high speed accident.

Do me a favor and watch This first.
Then get back to my on how durable older cars are.

I’m not sure @grumpyfish was entirely clear there, the point is that modern cars are severely damaged because they absorb the energy of the impact. That absorption protects the occupants much better than an older car that dos not absorb the energy, but shows less damage.

Darn, that wasn’t any clearer, was it?

@grumpyfish, excellent answer. The vehicle is made so that it collapses in stages and absorbs as much kinetic energy from the collision as possible so that the inhabitants are cushioned. Sacrifice the vehicle and save the inhabitants.

@Snarp, I thought it was.

Let me try @grumpyfish & @Snarp The car is designed so it gets broken and you don’t.

@csimme01 Your video wins for clarity. Driver of Bel Air would be dead. Driver of Malibu walks away.

@Snarp I work for GM and we are very proud of the safety of our cars and trucks.
(GM did not do the video however) What we all at work were suprised at was not just thebpoor occupant protection of the Bel Air but the almost total destruction of the vehicle.

@csimme01 WOW! That was a real eye opener! Thanks for posting that video!

@all I learned something new today!

@csimme01 I don’t have to even see the video I’m certain which video it is !! My point if both cars would have crashed at 5 MPH, I’m certain the newer model would have sustained basically the same damage. I’m not talking about safety at high speeds ,they need to built cars that can sustain small impacts and not require a 3k repair !

I once did the calculations (they’re not difficult, but I’m not going to run them again right now) for the force of a vehicle falling from a fourth-floor parking garage into the ground. I think that at impact the car is falling at a speed of about 20 mph, which would be equivalent to the force of two vehicles meeting head-on at 10 mph each.

The result of hat collision—for any commercially produced vehicle at any time—is very unlikely to be “no observable effect”, and the occupants are going to be subject to a lot of stress—and very likely severely injured or killed if not wearing restraints (seat belts) or padded by airbags or the like. If the vehicle’s front and rear ends are designed to crush in predictable ways, yet keep the cabin intact, then you have a vehicle whose occupants can survive, if not the vehicle itself.

Insurance companies are much happier to pay claims on “hardware damage”, which is predictable, finite and replaceable. People and body parts, not so much.

@Pretty_Lilly I don’t agree. Some cars do better than others but a 5MPH flat impact is usually not a big deal. As others have said The vehicle is designed to protect the occupants. I remember storys at work about a special vehicle that was reinforced to survive a 10MPH barrier impact undamaged. The problem was that regardless of what you did to the occupants of the vehicle (belts, airbags ect) they suffered serious injuries.

@Pretty_Lilly There is no way to predict if your going to get into a crash at all, much less whether it’ll be minor or serious. I’d rather spend more money fixing the damage from a small impact than thousands on funeral expenses from a big crash.

My first car was a 1976 Oldsmobile Delta 88. The thing was a tank. The ex that I sold it to finally totalled it by hitting a parked car while he was going at fast-lane highway speed. Even then, he had to turn the key off to stop it from running.

That was a good, durable car. We called it “the dumpster.”

I think its because they’re lighter now, which improves fuel economy?

One word—insurance.

@Blackberry True. Think of it this way. You start to build a car and you have a checklist of things you want. You the take your list and put it in order of importance. The top of the list has all the stuff required by law. Once you get those you need to choose safety, fuel economy performance ect. You start spending money and build the car. You get all the legal stuff done because you have too. Then you have to pick and choose depending on how much you want the car to cost. With a cheap car you don’t get too much farther down the list. Then you need to make trade-offs. IE great performance and great fuel economy don’t work well together. The thing people forget about today’s vehicles is how much of that required safety stuff there is. ABS, Stability, Air Bags, crush zones. They all make the car heavier and more expensive. The weight lowers fuel economy. You can’t have it all in the same car. Well they could use exotic materials but then your Focus will cost $250,000

The other trade-off is that the first millisecond or so of a low-speed impact is about the same (for the car) as a high-speed impact.

When you have something like 20 milliseconds to absorb the energy of a 2000# car hurtling into the car at 50mph, you can’t sacrifice the first millisecond or two to keeping the car intact if it turns out that it’s a low speed impact.

I live in the American South West. There are ALOT of older cars still running around here. Why? Because they can. Older cars had more of a special material in them called “steel”. They didn’t get very good fuel economy like new ones do nowadays. Cars that are plastic heavy aren’t expected to survive as long as the cars of yesteryear. Plastic because of its very nature decomposes, gets brittle from age, heat, UV etc. Stuff starts to come apart sooner and so the car doesn’t get to see many owners before their useful service ends. Its part of how car makers live. make cars that last too long and guess what happens…you don’t sell as many cars.

My 1972 M-B 220d is built like a panzer and still gets 38 mpg. Who says they have to be built like toilet paper to get good fuel economy?. The design of modern cars, in all fairness, is based on occupant protection in a collision. They are actually designed with sacrificial “crush zones” that protect the occupant “cage”. Such design does lead to a vehicle being a total loss at a relatively low speed collision.

Cars that are too heavy are bad for our environment.

@mattbrowne – “Cars are bad for our environment.” there, fixed that for you =)

@mattbrowne @grumpyfish There are many things worse than cars for our environment. Todays vehicles create such a small amount of pollution that things you might not think of are worse. For Example..
If you started your 2009 Suburban in New York and drove to L.A without turning the engine off the Suburban would create less pollution than if you used 2 gallons of latex paint to paint a room in your house.
Most of the pollution a vehicle creates is in the first minute after starting. Once the cat converter comes up to temp it is very good at it’s job.

@csimme01 I’m guessing your definition of “pollution” doesn’t include carbon dioxide. But more importantly, cars are actually an easy thing to change, whereas finding an acceptable alternative to the 2 gallons of latex paint is difficult and expensive, it is easy to switch to a smaller car, and it is cheaper in the long term. And there are how many million cars on the road? How many total road miles in a given year, versus how many gallons of latex paint used?

@csimme01 – Interesting claim. Are there numbers somewhere?

@Snarp, how hard is it to find “wallpaper” where you are? And no, I don’t consider carbon dioxide to be a pollutant, or else I’d have to kill one or both of us. And my dorg.

@CyanoticWasp We’re talking about environmental impact, and the carbon dug up out of millions of years of storage and spewed into the atmosphere by cars is part of their total environmental impact. It’s quite simple and appropriate to make a distinction between carbon dioxide that is in continuous circulation, such as through respiration, and fossil carbon.

Yes. In terms of carbon dioxide emissions it looks like this

heating and cooling of houses and offices > meat production > global shipping traffic > global air traffic > global truck and car traffic

But this still means that fossil fuel-based truck and car traffic contributes significantly. We have to become smarter about this segment as well.

21st century sailing ships are very promising for example.