Sure it does, but only in a crash that is 40 MPH or less. So the president of the IIHS is also displaying a misunderstanding of physics for noting this issue? I already shared a crash test above where they demonstrated the complete failure of a vehicle that has a good rating by the 40 MPH IIHS test to save the life of the driver at a 50 MPH test. Since you’re ignoring an actual professional test you’ll ignore anything else I say too.
50 MPH contains 1.56 times as much energy as 40 MPH. Since the airbag is bottomed out and can no longer do its purpose, .56 of the crash energy is left over. 40^2 * .53 = x^2, x = 29.1.
Crashing the Lexus at 50 MPH would be the equivalent of being in the same crash at 29.1 MPH with no airbag or seat belt.
Your attention is focused on something you haven’t proven, and seems unprovable. You also misunderstand how the safety systems work. In contrast, you are ignoring the HUGE real safety problem, that of driver distraction.
The dummy was not injured. The dummy was better controlled, first with the seatbelt pretensioner tightening the belt and holding the dummy, next when the belt reached a limit, allowed some slack to prevent damage to the upper torso.
The vehicles in those tests are obsolete compared today’s passive restraints. Some of those vehicle models were introduced in 1997, less than ten years after airbags were required in cars, the early days of passive restraints.
Totally dishonest with about 300 pounds of weight advantage. Try it with a 95 Camry and 2015 Corolla to have the same weight. Look at the modern Camry versus modern Yaris crash test that I linked to on Oct 8 2021. Oh and they chose the old Corolla that didn’t come with airbags too.
Old versus new is the situation where new cars are great for safety. When a new car comes out, all the other cars on the road are old, and the deaths in that new vehicle for highway head on crashes are much lower. Then when the rest of the cars become new too the fatalities go back up again.
With that Truck / SUV study that I linked to in a different discussion, for every 1 death that is avoided by people choosing to drive an SUV, 3.5 more deaths are created in the rest of the population that isn’t driving an SUV. That’s kind of how the old versus new thing started out as, but now with new versus new the head on crash safety isn’t so improved anymore. In the last 3 years the US fatal crashes per mile have started to go up. Of course much of that is due to increased diving speeds.
Also, I’m not even saying that modern cars that are post 2012 or post IIHS small overlap with an acceptable rating are as bad. The small overlap test changed things a lot. I don’t have that much data on those vehicles.
That test was performed in Australia, it seems airbags were not required there at that time. At 3:20 in the video the large horn pad comes off, same size and shape as the airbags used in the states.
Airbag or no airbag, if the crash victim has stopped breathing and is trapped in the car, there is little hope. The integrity of the cabin in many of those old cars is poor.
If they actually didn’t know what I was saying, and they thought that other people wouldn’t either, they wouldn’t be responding.
Barkydog if you really don’t understand what I’m saying is simple. Old versus old = normal fatalities. Old versus new = high fatalities for the old vehicle occupants and low fatalities for the modern vehicle occupants. New versus new = fatalities almost back up to what they were with old versus old.
Not meaning to hassle you, I think you have a tough skin, just to understand fatalities in new cars is similar to fatalities in old cars? So all this safety stuff has done little?
For highway speed head on collisions yes – we’re not really much better off than we would be if everyone drove mid 90s cars with IIHS acceptable or good ratings, at least for pre 2012 (pre IIHS small overlap) vehicles. For side impact there have been big improvements, and for <40MPH head on crashes there are improvements, but those <40MPH improvements are more to reduce minory injuries and not fatalities.
Most of the reduction in fatalities per mile traveled over the last few decades comes from increased seat belt use, the creation and use of the interstate highway system, and better side impact crash protection in cars, and the IIHS poor ratings which eliminated the real death traps (such as the 97-04 F150) that the 40 MPH IIHS moderate overlap crash test revealed. The 40 MPH moderate overlap crash test has been the current test from 1995 to 2012, so you can’t expect a car with an acceptable or good rating from 1995 to be worse than a 2012 car with a good rating, or a 2012 car to be safer in a highway speed head on crash than a 1995 car, with the exception of Volvo, and possibly a few others, but only Volvo actually did a 50 MPH test to prove that they exceeded the 40 MPH standard.
I have seen many examples of high speed crashes from coworkers, customers and the news where people walked away for late model vehicles. Vehicle safety has advanced greatly during the last 10 to 15 years.
Look at the Henry Ruggs (NFL) crash, an impact speed of 127 MPH and the doors open after the collision. That is one tough Chevrolet.
Th best safety device is completely under your control. It is being an aware and sober driver. That alone will increase your safety more than all the myriad safety devices installed on cars. If the safety devices really made us safer, our fatality rate would not be increasing.
Safety is not the only criteria for choosing a car. It doesn’t matter how safe a car is if you can’t afford that car. Room,comfort, fuel economy, performance, seating capacity, and style are all considerations.
It is like all the hysteria in past years about seat belts in school buses. The school bus is the safest vehicle on the road, It is 13 times safer than the child riding in their parents car and spending a lot of money on safety improvements on them reaches the point of diminishing returns.
I suspect that pursuing automatic load limiters for seat belts is simply not worth the costs.
I have been driving before seat belts or air bags were available and have never been in an accident where either was useful.
