>Car manufacturers, if so inclined,
could optimize their cars for crash test
scores instead of actual safety.
I think it's fair to say that cars are incredibly safe compared to 40 years ago. But crash safety compromises new cars in so many ways, it's a bit of a pity.
I've made my peace with body design but I really don't like the huge pillars they are putting in cars these days. I test drove a Mazda 3 recently and visibility in all directions was really poor compared to my current 09 Fit. The sensor suite is cool but it's not like airplanes where operators can be expected to pick up an instrument rating.
Pillars don't have to obscure visibility. Yes, we have curtain airbags now, but you've got airbags inside the pillars of your Fit. The difference between the pillars on your 09 Fit and the Mazda 3 are mostly design decisions. The Fit interior is just an insanely good design.
The angle and positioning of the pillar in relation to the driver are huge factors.
What's the formula for KE? What's the dominant term in that equation? What's the exponent on that term?
Anyone telling you that energy absorbing structures are of significant value except at a very narrow range of speeds and impact type is peddling falsehood.
The bulk of the improvement since the 90s (well into the era of crumple zones, remember they are a prerequisite for airbags) has been from better airbags, side curtain airbags, pre-tensioners and better modeling software that allows those things as well as seats and seatbelts to be engineered to levels that were unheard of even a decade ago. Whether you hit hard objects in a crash has a lot less to do with luck these days. Stronger cabins are a plus (especially for non-frontal crashes) too.
> All of those models scored Good on the driver side small overlap test, indicating that when Honda increased the safety on the driver's side to score Good on the driver's side test, they didn't apply the same changes to the passenger side.
This is an especially concerning observation for Honda. I'm curious if there's any more detail on this or if there's a plausible reason aside from gaming the benchmarks (e.g., the positioning of firewall-forward components might naturally favor small-overlap protection on the driver's side, or a steering-wheel mounted airbag would naturally perform better than dash-mounted).
It seems like, even if intentional, that it’s a sensible optimization. Among multi-car collisions, drivers’ side small offset collisions I’d expect to be vastly more common than passenger side small offset collisions.
In both single and multi car collisions, we will assume there’s a driver in all cars, but less than 100% chance for there to be a front-seat passenger in all cars.
It's very likely. The difference between RHD and LHD models are much more extreme than is obvious. Vehicles have to be designed with chirality in mind, but not everything can just be moved to the other side of the vehicle, for example, a FWD car usually has the engine orientation fixed regardless of market, which is going to cause asymmetries.
You'll sometimes see a real tight engine compartment, with a huge gap where the master cylinder and brake booster will go in the RHD models. I think that the 1990's Camaros and Firebirds had this peculiarity.
It also meant that changing the right hand side sparkplugs was a breeze, but the left side required either dropping the engine or drilling the firewall.
Looking again at the RHD Camaro I linked, it might be a conversion. The parking brake remains on the right side of the shift lever, and the wipers wipe in the LHD direction.
I'd love to know if there really are factory RHD Camaros, and if not then why did they have that unusually lopsided engine bay.
Additionally, it's probably a reasonable assumption that even in cases where a front-seat passenger is present, the majority of impacts would be driver side.
I thought about the following cases where you might encounter this type of impact:
1. Driver is not controlling the car properly (asleep, drunk, etc.) and leaves the carriageway and impacts some road furniture, etc. - in this case, single driver likely has around 50/50 chance of going left vs right, but an accompanied driver is less likely to have this type of incident (passenger can shout to wake the driver, reach for the wheel, etc.). As a result, total fatalities from this collision mode would probably be significantly higher for drivers than passengers.
2. Driver understeers around a corner. In this case, understeer would be more likely on a smaller radius corner than a larger one. As the drivers' side is closest to the other carriageway, this means that the driver would already need to be on the widest part of the curve in order for the impact to be on the passenger's side. This likely reduces the frequency of oversteering from the outside of a turn - although as a secondary consideration, it probably implies higher speed, and so potentially higher fatality rate. Therefore, as more oversteer-related incidents would happen from the inside of the curve, the driver is more likely to be impacted.
3. Impact occurs during overtaking. In this case, we assume the driver is in the opposite carriageway. Oncoming traffic is likely to evade, and during an overtaking manoeuvre, it is likely that evasion into the driver's original lane is not possible due to other traffic. As a result, both our driver and oncoming traffic are likely to try to evade off the carriageway (onto the hard shoulder, grass verge, etc.) Considering that this is a small overlap test, it would imply that evasion has been at least partially successful, implying reduced speeds, etc. It's probably not particularly more likely that either driver or passenger is subject to this impact.
I couldn't think of any other illustrative cases, but it does seem that the even considering that passengers are not present in all cases, the individual risk to a passenger is lower than the risk to a driver when there is one present.
The small overlap test is designed for situations where cars hit one-another, head on, on a narrow two lane road. So making changes only to the driver's side makes some sense here, because it's always the driver's sides that impact in this test. It's less "optimizing for the test" and more "optimizing for results", as these accidents used to be the most deadly type of accidents.
Additionally, this is a really, really difficult test to pass, which is why everyone failed it. Even the revisions didn't help too much because there's not much that can be done to an existing chassis other than add a deflection bar or something. True success here requires ground up engineering.
At last, after a word search of that web page and of the HN comments revealed no glossary-like description of "small overlap" collision, I thank you for your description of it.
I agree this seems especially odd since Honda are Japanese and in Japan the driver sits on the right (as they do in the UK, Australia, NZ and some others). I doesn't make sense for them to skimp on driver-side protection in these markets.
Honda domestic models are actually not as ubiquitous as you might think in Japan. They're typically larger than your average kei car; the roads are narrower, the speed limit is lower, and the crash safety standards just aren't the same as other countries.
The current generation Accord went on sale in the US more than 2 years before it went on sale in Japan. There aren't any factories even producing the Accord in Japan. Any of them that exist there are imported. It's primarily a car designed for the US (and other) markets.
The most popular Honda and Toyota models are just as American (or more so) than anything the Big 3 produces. Some of them are even designed in Detroit.
My understanding is that these companies were gaming the benchmarks, but one possible justification is that many vehicles have only one occupant: the driver. Adding weight and reinforcements for a seating position that's typically unoccupied may seem at least partially unjustifiable.
The small overlap tests started in 2013, most of the Hondas already scored "Good" in the small overlap tests by 2013.
The Author awards BMW and M-B excellent status for correcting their problems by 2017, but most of their cars were Poor/Marginal for 4 years.
Somehow Honda is worse for having most of their models "Good" in 2013 with only a few models having issues.
The Civic and the Accord for example have never been tested as anything but "Good" in these tests, whereas comparing them to the BMW 3-series and M-B C Class those cars tested out as "Poor" or "Marginal" for 4-5 years before they were corrected. The Pilot by comparison did have problems.
How this equates to BMW/M-B being great and Honda being problematic is terrible.
Note the author in his notes doesn't denote which cars/trucks/SUVs in which model years he's actually talking about, making it impossible to figure out how he's judging the brands. Most of doing well on these tests tended to have to do with where in the redesign cycle a manufacturer was with a particular car/truck/SUV.
Anything Tesla is tough because of the mobilized army of fans.
Electric cars are really amazing in some scenarios though - I was a passenger in a Tesla in a winter accident that would have been a rollover event in many cars… we ended up in a flat spin and in a ditch instead.
Volvo has always made safety a key value. I remember picking up my dad from a police station after he had been in a 50 car pileup in the 90s. His Volvo was unrecognizable, but he walked away, only needed help from a policeman to cut the seatbelt off as the buckle release wasn’t accessible.
This article seems to be ultra out of date and it doesn't cite the specific crash data showing why they grouped cars the way they did.
For example he's grouping BMW and Mercedes right below Volvo.. at least in the case of the Frontal Small Overlap test that doesn't seem right at all. The Small Overlap Frontal test was introduced in 2012.
The Honda Accord in 2013 was acing that test, BMW and Mercedes were failing it miserably for a few more years. The 2013 Accord IIRC should have been rated at least as high as the Volvos.
I have a 2013 Subaru, it got 5 stars in the frontal small overlap test as well, years ahead of the BMWs and Mercedes.
Something is just off about the whole thing if you remember back to when these tests were introduced and you were looking at buying a car.
Tesla pretty much never got anything but 5 stars in these 2 tests IIRC, not sure where that came from.
The article would have been much better if it linked to the specific crash data to support the claims. IIHS has all that data publicly available IIRC. It is good stuff to look at when buying a car.
BMW, Mercedes, and Toyota/Lexus were the real outliers who had appeared to try to "game" the old benchmarks and then failed these new tests the most spectacularly.
Right but he's equating "Acceptable" to worse than "Poor" as the German cars were achieving in the same time frame. The Tesla was "Acceptable" for years where the German cars were "Poor". Which is worse?
Also he's attributing poor passenger side tests to malice when the real reason might be that the engineering requirements are very different because the steering column doesn't exist on the passenger side.
Sure, there probably should be a category between 3 and 4 for Tesla: mediocre before and after. I’d prefer a car that is now safer over one that has always been mediocre, but that’s just me.
Right but he's punishing Tesla for scoring "Acceptable" for years on the test when they scored "Excellent" on the other tests.
And he's somehow rewarding M-B and BMW when they scored "Unacceptable" or "Poor" on the same tests for years when scoring "Excellent" on the other tests. Scoring Unacceptable/Marginal/Poor on a test when scoring Excellent on others is much more evidential that the car was specifically designed only to game the test standard.
It took Tesla longer to upgrade the car from "Acceptable" to "Excellent" on the new tests than it took BMW/Mercedes to upgrade their cars from "Poor" to "Excellent" on the tests, but that still means M-B and BMW put hundreds of thousands of cars with Poor crash performance on the road for years while Tesla was putting cars on the road with "Acceptable" performance in the same test. Somehow that makes Tesla worse in his rating system.
I heard from my wife that cars are designed for men— that is, the crash test dummies are all designed to represent “the average male”. I was really surprised by this.
That only changed relatively recently. I think in the last decade? Volvo was the only company testing on female dummies for much longer. They are the only company doing testing with models of pregnant women.
Not all crash test dummies are 50th percentile males[1]. In the United States:
Regulatory Frontal: 50th male in front-left and front-right, or 5th female in front-left and front-right
Regulatory Side, struck by SUV: 50th male
Regulatory Side, struck by pole: 50th male
NCAP Frontal: 50th male in front-left, 5th female in front-right
NCAP Side, struck by SUV: 50th male in front-left, 5th female in rear-left
NCAP Side, struck by pole: 50th male
As you can see, most tests are done with male dummies, and almost no females dummies are drivers. Fortunately, there's money that's just been allocated by Congress for doing more female dummy testing.
[1] Also important to note that, at least in the United States, the percentiles were determined in the 80s and Americans have gotten fatter.
As a kid in the 1990's, I got to go to the biggest crash test facility in the US, the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety. There were crash dummies of different sizes all the way down to kids and infants.
Here's a list of current US dummies, including average males, extra small females, kids, etc:
The IIHS is always ahead of the curve. They're sponsored by insurance companies, so they have a huge incentive to reduce injuries. (It's amazing what can be done when billionaires have their incentives align with a greater good)
But, they have no power to regulate. Vehicles that do poorly under IIHS testing are completely legal, they simply get named-and-shamed. Sometimes I wonder how lax NHTSA testing would be if it weren't for the comparison point which is the IIHS.
On the other hand, because they're sponsored by car insurance companies, they only care about injuries from impacts.
Like how them changing their whiplash tests caused neck pain and injuries for anyone significantly outside their test dummies. But because they're not caused by an impact, but rather because they fail cars that allow the user to adjust head restraints to be less effective for the median posture, they don't care.
I'm pretty sure they use two crash test dummies, one representing the 95% man, and another for the 5% woman. This was mentioned when I did a course on product design a few years ago. The article you linked seems terribly biased, and I wouldn't treat it as particularly reliable.
The latter being true doesn't really make the former true. If you have one dummy that represents the average male, you're not doing a good job designing for men either.
> Unfortunately, if we get into a car accident, we don't get to ask the driver of the vehicle we're colliding with to change their location, angle of impact, and speed, in order for the collision to comply with an IIHS, NHTSA, or *NCAP, test protocol.
I'm smitten with the stupid idea of teaching your self-driving car that when a crash can't be avoided it should attempt to make the crash as close as possible to the nearest crash test protocol of the jurisdiction it's operating in.
> when a crash can't be avoided it should attempt to make the crash as close as possible to the nearest crash test protocol of the jurisdiction it's operating in
Like quickly put a dummy in your seat and throw you out?
My motorcycle safety course said that in a car accident the safest place for you is inside the car in the middle of all of those airbag deployments, but in a motorcycle accident the safest place is to be thrown as far away from all of the spinning colliding sliding bending grinding metal as possible
One of my older brothers had that policy -- if at all possible he pushed away from the bike as hard as he could when it was clear an accident was unavoidable. He actually used that strategy twice, believe it or not. Worked swimmingly both times, which could just be chance.
You have to have proper luck with trajectory (your older brother had it to tell you the stories) - you go fast on a bike, you keep that speed when jumping off it. Then you either hit something hard (probably instant death) or you land and start sliding/tumbling.
If you still don't hit anything, you can often even walk away, or end up with minor arm/foot injury. Unfortunately I've seen videos of contrary, ie couple riding same bike, hitting car, flying over it, sliding maybe 50m and still hitting curb so hard their bodies jumped quite a bit in the air. Both dead on spot.
I don't remember the second accident, but I still recall the first one. A small car (VW Bug) pulled out in front of him and he t-boned it. He jumped. It was in an otherwise open area, so he rolled. Banged up a bit, but he figured he ended up better than if he had stayed with the bike, which ended up embedded in the car (something about VW Bugs having not much in the front wheel area that was strong, and that's where the bike hit).
As I said, it could entirely have been chance that this worked out for the best. I'm not a rider myself, and my brother is not an expert just a rando like me who has had a fair amount of interesting experiences in his life (how he is still alive today, I'm not quite sure, but luck has to be the biggest factor).
This is one of those feral motorcyclist myths (another one is "loud pipes save lives"). It's just a weird meme that there's some critical point at which it is optimal to throw your bike down and leap clear. That's nonsense. It's always optimal to stay on the bike and brake as hard as possible up to the moment of impact. Always. The energy necessary to get the bike into an intentional low-side dismount so you can jump clear is always better spent dumping kinetic energy into the brakes, with the bike fully upright and the front wheel fully loaded.
Another completely insane motorcyclist meme is if you are inevitably going to strike an animal in the road, it's better to hit it in a wheelie, that is, with the front wheel raised off the ground. Again: insane.
You don't personally have the strength to significantly change your vector. If you try to jump off the bike you are going to end up hitting whatever you were going to hit anyway. You may have an instantaneous power of perhaps 1-2 horsepower if you are superbly fit and are for some reason braced for action. The brakes on your motorcycle can decelerate you as much as 1g in dry weather. It's better to stay on.
My dad used to always tell me the story of someone in our extended family who got in an accident while riding his bike (he had his helmet on) and rode his bike himself to the hospital only to die the same day.
Not a medical professional, but that could easily be caused by something like a subdural hematoma.
I'm reminded of a talk at a science fiction convention years ago mostly targeted at writers (and done by a physician) - "Maim 'em Right." Basic message was that when writing injuries, make them realistic. If someone takes a blow to the head that knocks them unconscious for a significant amount of time, they're not resting for a day then getting up and going on to lots of exertion and winning the day. They're suffering from concussion, maybe subdural hematoma/brain bleed, etc.
Also discussion of TBI, including things like shaken baby syndrome - in the skull, the brain has a consistency somewhat more durable than thick jello. Get one of those brain jello molds available around Halloween, make a batch, then instead of unmolding it keep it sealed and give it a good shaking. THEN unmold it and see how much damage there's been.
There's around 4 km/s difference between geostationary orbital speed and the surface of the Earth. For a zero inclination circular orbit, you'd need to be at an altitude of ~1855000 km to have linear velocity equal to the nadir on Earth's surface.
The downside to this is that you also need to stop moving slowly. The benefit of airbags/crumple zones is that they prevent your squishy body from decelerating too rapidly. Great if you can get off the motorcycle and slowly slide to a stop in a dirt field, less good if you slide into a barrier or telephone pole.
At the risk of pissing off the people who care about automobile safety only as far as it enables them to earn internet virtue points...
Which decelerates your face more gently, 14" of air space for it to flop around in or 5" of air followed by 9" of airbag? Engineering tradeoff are everywhere.
You're absolutely right that slowing down slowly is the name of the game. Failing that, evenly spreading the force is the next best thing.
Being away from other cars is one thing, but how you get there is another.
There are only two ways to go down on a motorcycle. High-side or low-side. Pretty sure most people would prefer low-side if they ever had to pick. I had a high-side crash on a bicycle once. Luckily it was a grass field with soft dirt. Had to go home and change my pants after that one.
I went "over the bars" twice. Once I was passenger on a motorbike and I flew over the car we hit. The other time I was driving the motorbike and I did brake until the very end, thinking "oh shit, won't do": I stood up on the bike, while still braking. And flew over the car again. Waking up in the ambulance, temporarily blind, not knowing which year it was nor if I had a wife or not, wasn't cool. It took I'd say easily 15 minutes before I could see again: I started regaining sight in the hospital although I clearly remember paramedics talking to me in the ambulance.
I'm very lucky, in both cases, I didn't hit anything but the road. Especially not the car.
I still rode MX bike on tracks for a while then eventually quite entirely.
Now I've got a mountain bike and it's scary enough already!
Getting run over by a car after going down is a bad day.
The real technique, in my opinion (I have been down a few times), is to use the brakes to take off as much speed as possible while, if you can, bringing both the bike and yourself off the roadway and onto a shoulder or median.
And always: legal or not, lane split into stopped traffic so that it's an instinct. More than once the car in front of me has slammed his brakes on and I've split in next to him, only for him to be rear-ended by the car which was behind me.
Much better to be next to a car that is rear-ended than to be behind one.
I always move to the left in the left lane and to the right in the middle and right lanes when stopping or slowing down a lot on the highway to ensure that bikes have some place to go. Usually the car behind me gets it and then you can see a whole seam opening up. This also helps in case emergency vehicles need to pass.
Modern vehicles have seatbelt pre-tensioners to get drivers as close to the tested crash position as quickly as possible. Some vehicles also move the seat position before a crash to get you closer to the test position as well.
My 2019 Volvo XC40 pre-tensions the seatbelts and moves the seats like this.
I didn’t know it was a feature until I nearly got rear ended waiting on a left turn and the car went into rear impact protection mode. (Other driver veered off at the last second). It was quite impressive tbh.
I lilke the concept, but suspect it won't ever happen because the increased liability is too high.
If the self-driving tries, and it worsens the impact somehow, bigger lawsuit. If the self-driving fails to do so, bigger lawsuit.
And it might sound "insane" that a best attempt could result in worse liability than no attempt, but unfortunately there is a lot of legal precedent to back up the idea.
PS - Although legislation could make self-driving manufacturers immune from increased liability for these "best effort" systems.
Airbags are a pretty aggressive crash protection system. e.g.
Have been cases of glasses-wearers getting their face mangled in collisions they otherwise would have been ok in. Yet that tech still managed to get widely adopted by industry.
> it should attempt to make the crash as close as possible to the nearest crash test protocol
You jest but this is what humans and animals do instinctively. When you fall, you try to fall in a way that minimizes damage.
For example, if you trip over something and your hands are occupied so you can't use them to catch yourself, you will instinctively try to roll onto your shoulder instead of faceplanting into the ground.
You see this in freestyle motorcycle and mountain bike riding, and skateboarding etc as well. If you see you aren't going to land the trick, you try to throw the bike or skateboard away from you and land feet first down the ramp. Plenty of videos of pros doing this on youtube.
The way pros fall is definitely more than just instinct, though. The human instinct to fully extend an arm when falling is a much worse way to fall than tuck-and-roll, etc.
I had a pretty bad accident way back in the 80's where I had the choice between multiple small impacts or one big one. That was a very easy choice to make. Obviously, this sort of opportunity to make a choice is extremely rare in case of an accident. Unfortunately 'no accident' wasn't on the menu any more.
> Attempt to make the crash as close as possible to the nearest crash test protocol
What if the nearest crash test protocol is an absolute "worst case" scenario like the "small overlap test" [0]. Here, getting any additional coverage would improve the outcome, even though it makes it less similar to the most-relevant IIHS test.
The title feels pretty disingenuous here because the small overlap test is substantially more difficult than the full frontal, or half overlap tests that were tested previously. As was discovered when looking at real world crash data, the improvement in outcomes from the 50% overlap tests fell off dramatically in 10% overlap situations. Hence, why a new test specifically for that was introduced.
I think a better way to look at how cars fair in crash tests that they are not "specifically optimized" for is to look at results from real world crash data. Like, among various vehicles which received top marks in <crash test>, how did buyers of those vehicles fair in real world accidents that the crash tests are designed to simulate.
I'm still driving my 2004 Volvo XC70. It crossed 100K miles this summer. My thinking is to replace it next year with a newer XC70. I love the shape and form factor. Wish they were still made. While I feel safe in the case, I know that I'm missing out on new active safety features.
>Another issue is crash test dummy overfitting. For a long time, adult NHSTA and IIHS tests used a 1970s 50%-ile male dummy, which is 5'9" and 171lbs. Regulators called for a female dummy in 1980 but due to budget cutbacks during the Reagan era, initial plans were shelved and the NHSTA didn't put one in a car until 2003. The female dummy is a scaled down version of the male dummy, scaled down to 5%-ile 1970s height and weight (4'11", 108lbs; another model is 4'11", 97lbs). In frontal crash tests, when a female dummy is used, it's always a passenger (a 5%-ile woman is in the driver's seat in one NHSTA side crash test and the IIHS side crash test). For reference, in 2019, the average weight of a U.S. adult male was 198 lbs and the average weight of a U.S. adult female was 171 lbs.
Women are neglected in testing of every standard. Essentially they’re benchmarks of computer performance in human form, with the most hopeful data being used.
It’s much harder to account for women who have more variation such as hips, breasts, pregnancy status, corporate would rather rather tell you the best results with the cheapest and the best case results. The weight of the dummies, the height, and the lack of variation is both cost cutting, testing the most healthy models, and way to bypass the regulations with clever tricks that most people trust because there aren’t more data sources and it’s a lot of effort to learn more.
Most things that are tested are, especially pharmaceutical drugs. They use men’s dosages and at most change bu weight but ignore important factors that are women’s issues since it’s easier to neglect it lazily, then blame the patient’s biology rather than the doctor’s incompetence and lack of research, but the lack of information that drug companies give.
Paid drug trials are often signed up for by more risk taking males, and hormone cycles of women make drugs have more variation they’d rather sweep under the rug, you also see the difference in showdogs winners where a female dog’s hormone cycle like her period can destroy performance.
Another cost cutting example is the lack of long term effects, they use mice models rather than dogs because it’s cheaper and shows less long term effects, win/win for hiding these results until it’s discovered by real world usage.
Something encouraging though are computer physics simulations. Volvo has been at the forefront of safety, they’re the top rated, tested on women before regulations forced others to, making the safety belt and not patenting it, encouraging its usage due to their focus and morality. The results don’t surprise me.
This is Goodhart's law in action. If the score doesn't actually reflect how safe the car is then the the parameters of the score ought to be modified. Maybe a single score doesn't capture everything and you may give a different score to someone looking for a car for individual driving vs couples vs a family with young kids.
I think it's appropriate to consider that this particular test ("driver-side small overlap") is not a random situation to which the car simply isn't specifically optimized for, but rather a de facto adversarial example - the particular model of accident was chosen because people observed that this type of accident seems to cause a lot of injuries, i.e. that this test intentionally targeted a specific known weakness of the current cars; so it's no wonder that the initial test results confirmed that.
If the average car would already (pre-modifications) do well in driver-side small overlap situations, then this type of crash would simply not get chosen for extra testing.
Do we then need to discount for “the particular failure modes of the most popular models are more likely to appear in the overall accident stats, and thus more likely to be used for the next set of test protocols”? :)
Over fitting to crash test benchmarks is a kinda obvious problem. From an engineering perspective one needs to have a good idea how a crash looks like to be able to optimize safe vehicles. The two options are, to write the standard oneself, that is a lot of hard work, or to go to the crash test standards, who hopefully did precisely that hard work, and optimize for the standard crashes.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadI think it's fair to say that cars are incredibly safe compared to 40 years ago. But crash safety compromises new cars in so many ways, it's a bit of a pity.
The angle and positioning of the pillar in relation to the driver are huge factors.
Anyone telling you that energy absorbing structures are of significant value except at a very narrow range of speeds and impact type is peddling falsehood.
The bulk of the improvement since the 90s (well into the era of crumple zones, remember they are a prerequisite for airbags) has been from better airbags, side curtain airbags, pre-tensioners and better modeling software that allows those things as well as seats and seatbelts to be engineered to levels that were unheard of even a decade ago. Whether you hit hard objects in a crash has a lot less to do with luck these days. Stronger cabins are a plus (especially for non-frontal crashes) too.
This is an especially concerning observation for Honda. I'm curious if there's any more detail on this or if there's a plausible reason aside from gaming the benchmarks (e.g., the positioning of firewall-forward components might naturally favor small-overlap protection on the driver's side, or a steering-wheel mounted airbag would naturally perform better than dash-mounted).
In both single and multi car collisions, we will assume there’s a driver in all cars, but less than 100% chance for there to be a front-seat passenger in all cars.
It also meant that changing the right hand side sparkplugs was a breeze, but the left side required either dropping the engine or drilling the firewall.
I'm not from the UK or any other RHD market, but if you are then are some cars, such as the Camaro/Firebird, sold LHD there? Or just not sold at all?
I'd love to know if there really are factory RHD Camaros, and if not then why did they have that unusually lopsided engine bay.
I thought about the following cases where you might encounter this type of impact:
1. Driver is not controlling the car properly (asleep, drunk, etc.) and leaves the carriageway and impacts some road furniture, etc. - in this case, single driver likely has around 50/50 chance of going left vs right, but an accompanied driver is less likely to have this type of incident (passenger can shout to wake the driver, reach for the wheel, etc.). As a result, total fatalities from this collision mode would probably be significantly higher for drivers than passengers.
2. Driver understeers around a corner. In this case, understeer would be more likely on a smaller radius corner than a larger one. As the drivers' side is closest to the other carriageway, this means that the driver would already need to be on the widest part of the curve in order for the impact to be on the passenger's side. This likely reduces the frequency of oversteering from the outside of a turn - although as a secondary consideration, it probably implies higher speed, and so potentially higher fatality rate. Therefore, as more oversteer-related incidents would happen from the inside of the curve, the driver is more likely to be impacted.
3. Impact occurs during overtaking. In this case, we assume the driver is in the opposite carriageway. Oncoming traffic is likely to evade, and during an overtaking manoeuvre, it is likely that evasion into the driver's original lane is not possible due to other traffic. As a result, both our driver and oncoming traffic are likely to try to evade off the carriageway (onto the hard shoulder, grass verge, etc.) Considering that this is a small overlap test, it would imply that evasion has been at least partially successful, implying reduced speeds, etc. It's probably not particularly more likely that either driver or passenger is subject to this impact.
I couldn't think of any other illustrative cases, but it does seem that the even considering that passengers are not present in all cases, the individual risk to a passenger is lower than the risk to a driver when there is one present.
Additionally, this is a really, really difficult test to pass, which is why everyone failed it. Even the revisions didn't help too much because there's not much that can be done to an existing chassis other than add a deflection bar or something. True success here requires ground up engineering.
The most popular Honda and Toyota models are just as American (or more so) than anything the Big 3 produces. Some of them are even designed in Detroit.
The small overlap tests started in 2013, most of the Hondas already scored "Good" in the small overlap tests by 2013.
The Author awards BMW and M-B excellent status for correcting their problems by 2017, but most of their cars were Poor/Marginal for 4 years.
Somehow Honda is worse for having most of their models "Good" in 2013 with only a few models having issues.
The Civic and the Accord for example have never been tested as anything but "Good" in these tests, whereas comparing them to the BMW 3-series and M-B C Class those cars tested out as "Poor" or "Marginal" for 4-5 years before they were corrected. The Pilot by comparison did have problems.
How this equates to BMW/M-B being great and Honda being problematic is terrible.
Note the author in his notes doesn't denote which cars/trucks/SUVs in which model years he's actually talking about, making it impossible to figure out how he's judging the brands. Most of doing well on these tests tended to have to do with where in the redesign cycle a manufacturer was with a particular car/truck/SUV.
Electric cars are really amazing in some scenarios though - I was a passenger in a Tesla in a winter accident that would have been a rollover event in many cars… we ended up in a flat spin and in a ditch instead.
Volvo has always made safety a key value. I remember picking up my dad from a police station after he had been in a 50 car pileup in the 90s. His Volvo was unrecognizable, but he walked away, only needed help from a policeman to cut the seatbelt off as the buckle release wasn’t accessible.
For example he's grouping BMW and Mercedes right below Volvo.. at least in the case of the Frontal Small Overlap test that doesn't seem right at all. The Small Overlap Frontal test was introduced in 2012.
The Honda Accord in 2013 was acing that test, BMW and Mercedes were failing it miserably for a few more years. The 2013 Accord IIRC should have been rated at least as high as the Volvos.
I have a 2013 Subaru, it got 5 stars in the frontal small overlap test as well, years ahead of the BMWs and Mercedes.
Something is just off about the whole thing if you remember back to when these tests were introduced and you were looking at buying a car.
Tesla pretty much never got anything but 5 stars in these 2 tests IIRC, not sure where that came from.
The article would have been much better if it linked to the specific crash data to support the claims. IIHS has all that data publicly available IIRC. It is good stuff to look at when buying a car.
BMW, Mercedes, and Toyota/Lexus were the real outliers who had appeared to try to "game" the old benchmarks and then failed these new tests the most spectacularly.
You’re not recalling correctly. The Model S got an “acceptable” rating on the small frontal offset test in 2017: https://www.slashgear.com/tesla-model-s-again-fails-to-earn-...
Also he's attributing poor passenger side tests to malice when the real reason might be that the engineering requirements are very different because the steering column doesn't exist on the passenger side.
And he's somehow rewarding M-B and BMW when they scored "Unacceptable" or "Poor" on the same tests for years when scoring "Excellent" on the other tests. Scoring Unacceptable/Marginal/Poor on a test when scoring Excellent on others is much more evidential that the car was specifically designed only to game the test standard.
It took Tesla longer to upgrade the car from "Acceptable" to "Excellent" on the new tests than it took BMW/Mercedes to upgrade their cars from "Poor" to "Excellent" on the tests, but that still means M-B and BMW put hundreds of thousands of cars with Poor crash performance on the road for years while Tesla was putting cars on the road with "Acceptable" performance in the same test. Somehow that makes Tesla worse in his rating system.
https://kjonnsforskning.no/en/2019/06/cars-are-still-designe...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevetengler/2021/02/16/volvo-c...
Regulatory Frontal: 50th male in front-left and front-right, or 5th female in front-left and front-right
Regulatory Side, struck by SUV: 50th male
Regulatory Side, struck by pole: 50th male
NCAP Frontal: 50th male in front-left, 5th female in front-right
NCAP Side, struck by SUV: 50th male in front-left, 5th female in rear-left
NCAP Side, struck by pole: 50th male
As you can see, most tests are done with male dummies, and almost no females dummies are drivers. Fortunately, there's money that's just been allocated by Congress for doing more female dummy testing.
[1] Also important to note that, at least in the United States, the percentiles were determined in the 80s and Americans have gotten fatter.
Here's a list of current US dummies, including average males, extra small females, kids, etc:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies
But, they have no power to regulate. Vehicles that do poorly under IIHS testing are completely legal, they simply get named-and-shamed. Sometimes I wonder how lax NHTSA testing would be if it weren't for the comparison point which is the IIHS.
Like how them changing their whiplash tests caused neck pain and injuries for anyone significantly outside their test dummies. But because they're not caused by an impact, but rather because they fail cars that allow the user to adjust head restraints to be less effective for the median posture, they don't care.
Thankfully NHTSA has a much broader mandate.
What they claim to do there is to use their real world data to try to optimize for real crashs and not for crash tests.
I'm smitten with the stupid idea of teaching your self-driving car that when a crash can't be avoided it should attempt to make the crash as close as possible to the nearest crash test protocol of the jurisdiction it's operating in.
Like quickly put a dummy in your seat and throw you out?
If you still don't hit anything, you can often even walk away, or end up with minor arm/foot injury. Unfortunately I've seen videos of contrary, ie couple riding same bike, hitting car, flying over it, sliding maybe 50m and still hitting curb so hard their bodies jumped quite a bit in the air. Both dead on spot.
As I said, it could entirely have been chance that this worked out for the best. I'm not a rider myself, and my brother is not an expert just a rando like me who has had a fair amount of interesting experiences in his life (how he is still alive today, I'm not quite sure, but luck has to be the biggest factor).
Another completely insane motorcyclist meme is if you are inevitably going to strike an animal in the road, it's better to hit it in a wheelie, that is, with the front wheel raised off the ground. Again: insane.
Survivor bias. The people that it didn't work for don't get to tell you how well it worked.
I'm reminded of a talk at a science fiction convention years ago mostly targeted at writers (and done by a physician) - "Maim 'em Right." Basic message was that when writing injuries, make them realistic. If someone takes a blow to the head that knocks them unconscious for a significant amount of time, they're not resting for a day then getting up and going on to lots of exertion and winning the day. They're suffering from concussion, maybe subdural hematoma/brain bleed, etc.
Also discussion of TBI, including things like shaken baby syndrome - in the skull, the brain has a consistency somewhat more durable than thick jello. Get one of those brain jello molds available around Halloween, make a batch, then instead of unmolding it keep it sealed and give it a good shaking. THEN unmold it and see how much damage there's been.
Whoever is running the teleporter would have to have "collision avoidance" strategies I guess. :-)
Which decelerates your face more gently, 14" of air space for it to flop around in or 5" of air followed by 9" of airbag? Engineering tradeoff are everywhere.
You're absolutely right that slowing down slowly is the name of the game. Failing that, evenly spreading the force is the next best thing.
There are only two ways to go down on a motorcycle. High-side or low-side. Pretty sure most people would prefer low-side if they ever had to pick. I had a high-side crash on a bicycle once. Luckily it was a grass field with soft dirt. Had to go home and change my pants after that one.
I'm very lucky, in both cases, I didn't hit anything but the road. Especially not the car.
I still rode MX bike on tracks for a while then eventually quite entirely.
Now I've got a mountain bike and it's scary enough already!
And did you stop riding?
Getting run over by a car after going down is a bad day.
The real technique, in my opinion (I have been down a few times), is to use the brakes to take off as much speed as possible while, if you can, bringing both the bike and yourself off the roadway and onto a shoulder or median.
And always: legal or not, lane split into stopped traffic so that it's an instinct. More than once the car in front of me has slammed his brakes on and I've split in next to him, only for him to be rear-ended by the car which was behind me.
Much better to be next to a car that is rear-ended than to be behind one.
I didn’t know it was a feature until I nearly got rear ended waiting on a left turn and the car went into rear impact protection mode. (Other driver veered off at the last second). It was quite impressive tbh.
Edit: For the curious:
https://www.volvocars.com/lb/support/manuals/xc90/2018w46/dr...
https://www.volvocars.com/en-th/support/manuals/v60/2017w17/...
If the self-driving tries, and it worsens the impact somehow, bigger lawsuit. If the self-driving fails to do so, bigger lawsuit.
And it might sound "insane" that a best attempt could result in worse liability than no attempt, but unfortunately there is a lot of legal precedent to back up the idea.
PS - Although legislation could make self-driving manufacturers immune from increased liability for these "best effort" systems.
You jest but this is what humans and animals do instinctively. When you fall, you try to fall in a way that minimizes damage.
For example, if you trip over something and your hands are occupied so you can't use them to catch yourself, you will instinctively try to roll onto your shoulder instead of faceplanting into the ground.
You see this in freestyle motorcycle and mountain bike riding, and skateboarding etc as well. If you see you aren't going to land the trick, you try to throw the bike or skateboard away from you and land feet first down the ramp. Plenty of videos of pros doing this on youtube.
An AI driver should have those instincts too imo. I’d expect my car to crash in the safest possible way if it can’t not crash.
https://www.mercedesbenzofnatick.com/new-features-mercedes-b...
What if the nearest crash test protocol is an absolute "worst case" scenario like the "small overlap test" [0]. Here, getting any additional coverage would improve the outcome, even though it makes it less similar to the most-relevant IIHS test.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZC8Ykl1esE
I think a better way to look at how cars fair in crash tests that they are not "specifically optimized" for is to look at results from real world crash data. Like, among various vehicles which received top marks in <crash test>, how did buyers of those vehicles fair in real world accidents that the crash tests are designed to simulate.
a. Electric Volvo?
b. Won't even need a car by then?
Women are neglected in testing of every standard. Essentially they’re benchmarks of computer performance in human form, with the most hopeful data being used.
It’s much harder to account for women who have more variation such as hips, breasts, pregnancy status, corporate would rather rather tell you the best results with the cheapest and the best case results. The weight of the dummies, the height, and the lack of variation is both cost cutting, testing the most healthy models, and way to bypass the regulations with clever tricks that most people trust because there aren’t more data sources and it’s a lot of effort to learn more.
Most things that are tested are, especially pharmaceutical drugs. They use men’s dosages and at most change bu weight but ignore important factors that are women’s issues since it’s easier to neglect it lazily, then blame the patient’s biology rather than the doctor’s incompetence and lack of research, but the lack of information that drug companies give.
Paid drug trials are often signed up for by more risk taking males, and hormone cycles of women make drugs have more variation they’d rather sweep under the rug, you also see the difference in showdogs winners where a female dog’s hormone cycle like her period can destroy performance.
Another cost cutting example is the lack of long term effects, they use mice models rather than dogs because it’s cheaper and shows less long term effects, win/win for hiding these results until it’s discovered by real world usage.
Something encouraging though are computer physics simulations. Volvo has been at the forefront of safety, they’re the top rated, tested on women before regulations forced others to, making the safety belt and not patenting it, encouraging its usage due to their focus and morality. The results don’t surprise me.
https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/the-ratings-expla...
If the average car would already (pre-modifications) do well in driver-side small overlap situations, then this type of crash would simply not get chosen for extra testing.
How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23689538 - June 2020 (343 comments)