
A small 2009 car demolishes a 1959 Chevy in a crash test [video] - Bud
http://kottke.org/16/01/a-small-2009-car-demolishes-a-1959-chevy-in-a-crash-test
======
Animats
Your tax dollars at work. The auto industry fought most of the improvements
that make that safety improvement possible. They fought seat belts. They
fought air bags. They fought crumple zones. They lost.

Except Volvo, which was usually ahead of regulations on safety. They had each
of those things before they were mandated.

Volvo's CEO has announced that they want to eliminate all deaths in Volvo cars
by 2020. He also says that if a self-driving car has an accident, it's the
manufacturer's fault and the manufacturer's financial responsibility.

~~~
mulmen
Do you have examples of the auto industry fighting safety features? I used to
own an early 70s Oldsmobile Toronado which was available with both ABS and
airbags. A quick Google search suggests that Chrysler and Ford had similar
braking systems in 1971, possibly even better. ABS was not required by US law
until 2011. 40 years after the US domestics first offered it.

I believe Ford made a big deal out of their padded dashboards in the 1950s as
well but I would have to dig up references to that.

While Volvo has a great safety record they are not even close to the only
manufacturer with a history of adding safety features to their cars. Safety is
good business, the US domestics have known this for decades.

The 1971 Oldsmobile Torornado brochure prominently features ABS and
specifically calls out the safety features available in that year:
[http://www.lov2xlr8.no/brochures/olds/71toro/bilder/6.jpg](http://www.lov2xlr8.no/brochures/olds/71toro/bilder/6.jpg)

~~~
mturmon
The US auto industry fought air bags for about two decades, saying they were
too expensive and that people did not want them:
[http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html](http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html)

"Top Ford Motor Company executives went so far as to arrange a meeting with
President Nixon to plead against a federal regulation that would have required
air bags in all cars, starting with 1973 models. The meeting had the desired
effect: Mr. Nixon ordered the regulation quashed. Eleven years after the 1971
meeting, a transcript from secret Oval Office tapes disclosed the
conversation."

I believe the Toronado air bags might have been offered just to provide a tool
to say consumers did not want them.

Earlier on, they also fought seat belts. Then later, they fought _for_ state
laws mandating seat belt use by drivers, just so they could say the airbags
were not necessary in the presence of seat belts. And a bunch of other stuff.
Classic cartel behavior.

~~~
Camillo
I don't even understand their logic. Why not simply ask the government to ban
or restrict the use of old cars without those safety features, after a short
transition period? That would boost sales by forcing motorists to upgrade.
Emission regulations in Europe work that way and they are a boon for the auto
industry.

~~~
pm24601
> Emission regulations in Europe work that way and they are a boon for the
> auto industry.

For some reason, VW didn't see it that way wrt the diesel emissions.

Maybe you need to recheck your understanding of other motivations.

~~~
Camillo
I said that auto companies could pursue their self-interest by turning
regulations to their advantage, rather than opposing them. I didn't say they
would embrace environmentalism in the truest depth of their hearts. Accepting
emission standards for the entire industry and then cheating on them is fully
consistent for an actor driven by self-interest, as long as they think they
won't get caught.

Given the obviousness of the above, the real question is how you came to make
such a silly post. My best guess is that you simplified the positions into
"companies accept emission standards = companies GOOD on environment, but VW
cheating = VW BAD on environment", and that's how you saw a contradiction.
Please take a bit longer to think your posts through.

~~~
pm24601
O.k. Let me be more explicit. Automobile companies have a different self-
interest than you think they should. (As demonstrated by VW's action)

VW has over 450,000 people - all viewing the world differently ( as
demonstrated by VW's corporate actions differently)

Out of 450,000+, excluding the dealerships, not one agreed with you enough to
blow the whistle.

------
padobson
So in 50 years we've traveled light years in safety, but only about thirty
miles in naming conventions[1].

[1][https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Bel+Air,+Los+Angeles,+CA/Mal...](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Bel+Air,+Los+Angeles,+CA/Malibu,+CA/@34.0924988,-118.7482466,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x80c2bd196c4ef2fb:0xe451252bd7d4d458!2m2!1d-118.459463!2d34.1002455!1m5!1m1!1s0x80e81da9f908d63f:0x93b72d71b2ea8c5a!2m2!1d-118.7797571!2d34.0259216)

~~~
mikeash
The Malibu name is already over 50 years old, actually. It would have been
amusing to redo this test with two Malibus.

------
Amorymeltzer
My wife and I recently finished an introductory auto mechanics class — which
was an incredibly fun time and an excellent experience — and one of the
recurring themes of the class was just how miserable, unreliable, and
dangerous cars were ~50 years ago. This video is a good example of that; it's
not just mileage or seat belts or airbags, it's everything from tires to
engines to brakes.

~~~
Someone1234
Wish I could find an adult intro to auto mechanics class around here. That
would be massively useful for everyone to learn but it seems like all anyone
who already knows basic auto repair says is "YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT?!"
with a sarcastic condescending tone, and I guess that attitude filters down to
lack of education since it is _obvious_ or whatever.

But on the positive note there is a 101 to gun safety class every two city
blocks so I have that going for me...

~~~
fancy_pantser
This is going to sound daft at first, but hear me out...

Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 on Steam is actually a reasonable, entertaining
way to walk through the basics of auto repair. It will help you learn he names
and functions of individual parts and systems as well as how they are
interconnected, what they look like, their relative cost, and generally where
they are. In the game you will, for example, start with real-life diagnostic
codes and then troubleshoot from there, buying parts you hope will fix the
issue.

After playing the game if you go to YouTube and search for your exact car (by
year, make, and model), you'll find a bunch of repair videos. You'll now have
the vocabulary and basic understanding to follow along with any common repair.

~~~
masklinn
Also /r/justrolledintotheshop you discover a significant amount of information
by looking at that stuff and dropping a comment asking what you're seeing (if
somebody hasn't already done that, which has usually happened). The denizens
of that subreddit are incredibly nice and the subreddit is halfway hilarious
and terrifying: some people drive these things[0]… around you…

[0] [http://imgur.com/90AvmSL](http://imgur.com/90AvmSL)

------
biot
If you saw this video almost 7 years ago there's really nothing new here. At
the risk of being redundant, it should have "[2009]" in the title. Here's an
article from 2009 with aftermath pics, etc. showing the difference in occupant
protection: [http://www.autoblog.com/2009/09/26/pics-aplenty-iihs-
reveals...](http://www.autoblog.com/2009/09/26/pics-aplenty-iihs-reveals-
before-and-after-of-malibu-bel-air-cr/)

~~~
sosuke
"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Insurance
Institute For Highway Safety."

No one is safe from link rot.

------
JustSomeNobody
They sure don't make 'em like they used to.

~~~
wmeredith
Thank god.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Thank the federal government.

~~~
baddox
Did the federal government invent any safety features, or did they just
mandate them once car manufacturers invented them?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
That's some serious revisionist history, right there:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_response)

~~~
baddox
The section you linked to doesn't seem to say anything about who invented
various automobile safety mechanisms.

------
fastaguy88
To add a personal perspective, when I got my first car in 1970, there were
about 50,000 deaths per year for 200 million people. We were driving 75 - 80
on the interstates in the midwest on bias-ply tires with drum brakes and solid
rear axles. Despite more than a 50% increase in population, total fatalities
are under 35K/year, and trending down. By 2013 (the last year in wikipedia),
the fatality rate was 2.5X lower than 45 years earlier.

~~~
zokier
I suspect the number of cars (per capita) has dramatically increased too,
hilighting the improved safety even more.

------
jedberg
I like how they added the detail of the fuzzy dice for the older car.

------
humble_dev
I wish that that someone did some tests between old and new software, I bet
uptime of old software/hardware would be higher than our current tech stack.

~~~
_yosefk
I don't know about uptime, but most of the new programming languages have no
undefined behavior (a Java program always behaves as a Java program whatever
your bugs are), while most of the old languages do have undefined behavior
(even Ada has garbage-initialized variables.) Hardware-wise, there's memory
protection and virtualization, whereas old Unix, Windows, etc. all let you
crap all over any piece of memory because there was no efficient way to
prevent arbitrary machine code from doing that. Security also improved
tremendously, in relative terms.

So we're far from unhackable, never-crashing software, but then cars, too are
still relatively dangerous, just much less so than they used to be.

(Now one interesting thing that I wonder about, though, with all those thank
yous going out to the government, Ralph Nader and other deities in sibling
comments, is just how reliable this crash test is; meaning, what happens if
you try other angles, which are not in the _standard_ test.)

~~~
DerekL
>I don't know about uptime, but most of the new programming languages have no
undefined behavior (a Java program always behaves as a Java program whatever
your bugs are), while most of the old languages do have undefined behavior
(even Ada has garbage-initialized variables.)

BTW, Java does have implementation-defined or unspecified behavior (for
instance, using the same objects from different threads without proper
coordination), but there's much less of it and it's easier to avoid.

~~~
_yosefk
That's true, and it's true of most languages, and unfortunately people trip
over it even when they can totally avoid it by hiding threads behind other
abstractions. So yeah, silly of me to have forgotten it.

That said, AFAIK _language-level_ invariants in Java (and Python, etc.) cannot
be violated by the lack of thread safety; meaning, you can still inspect every
live object and see its state. _Program-level_ invariants might go to heck,
for sure. So what I should have said is more along the lines of "memory
safety" than "lack of undefined behavior"; I'm not sure what the shortest and
most precise way to put it is, though. (It does not quite end with memory
safety but it doesn't quite get to lack of undefined behavior, either.)

------
dshibarshin
Reminds me of the classic Chevrolet Corvairs which were equipped with a
single-piece steering column that could impale the driver in a head-on
collision.

~~~
sokoloff
Was by no means confined to the Corvair. Early Mustangs (65-most of 67) had
non-collapsible steering columns (and 65s didn't come with even lap belts
standard [federal mandate in 66]).

65s also had single-circuit brakes, meaning the leak of just one wheel
cylinder (not entirely uncommon) could render the entire braking system
inoperative, leaving you heading towards a collision with no brakes, a one-
piece "Spear-o-matic" steering column and no lap belts. Ugly, so two of the
first mods I did to my '65 were dual-circuit braking system and lap belts.
(The steering column change is unfortunately quite involved.)

~~~
onre
Basically everything pre-mid-'60s had this.

~~~
masklinn
IIRC it was also common for the engine to follow the steering column into the
passenger compartment to polish off the driver and break the passenger's legs
in case they hadn't been maimed yet.

------
ljk
Stupid question: where do they get the 1959 vehicle for these tests? Is it
just an old one laying around somewhere?

~~~
Sanddancer
They bought it off a classified ad. The guy they bought it from was pissed
when he found out what they did. [1]

[1] [http://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-
histories/automoti...](http://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-
histories/automotive-history-an-x-ray-look-at-gms-x-frame-1957-1970/) Search
for "Jim Snell"

------
ars
Direct link to video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U)

------
fnordfnordfnord
Old people: "They sure don't make 'em like they used to!"

Me: Thank goodness.

------
stonogo
When you start describing midsize family sedans as 'small cars' you cross the
line into clickbait.

~~~
madengr
Midsize family sedans have absurdly small interiors these days. Maybe it's the
horribly large dash boards, but they just have no room. I hate them.

~~~
csours
A lot of space is used up on safety equipment. As one small example A-Pillars
(at the edges of the windshield) are very large to incorporate the safety
cage, rollover protection, and airbags. [1] This leads to a weird problem
where the car is very safe in a crash, but slightly more likely to get in an
accident due to visibility issues.

There are existing lane change warning systems for rear visibility, I expect
there will soon be forward sensing systems as well; and of course SDCs are
coming as well.

Seats also take up a significant amount of room - partly to safety
considerations, but also a bit to lazy design.

1\. [http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/new-pillars-enhance-
safet...](http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/new-pillars-enhance-safety-
impede-visibility)

------
superuser2
We've made enormous progress in holding up under collision, but giant steps
back in collision avoidance. I remember around 5 years ago seeing a concept
for the "car of the future" as basically a glass box optimizing visibility. In
fact we've done the opposite: high beltlines, low and elongated roofs, rear
visibility and rear side windows approaching zero.

Volkswagen makes just about the only high-quality compact in the neighborhood
of $20k that you can actually see out of. Mazda3, Prius, Elantra, etc. are
seemingly part of a concerted effort to make the greatest amount of damage
possible to the driver's situational awareness. Why? Just so they can sell you
the blindspot monitoring options?

------
rayiner
If car safety stayed at 1960 levels, there would be about 60,000 car deaths
per year. Valuing a human life at about $5 million, those 30,000 extra deaths
would have an economic cost of $150 billion per year.

~~~
mikeash
It would be a lot worse than that, actually. In 1960 there were about 720
billion vehicle miles traveled in the US, and these days it's about 3
trillion, an increase of a bit over 4x. In 1960 there were about 36,000
traffic fatalities, so given a bit over 4x exposure you'd see about 150,000
traffic fatalities per year today. That's about 120,000 or $600 billion.

~~~
rfrey
Even that might be conservative, since it seems reasonable that deaths would
increase more than linearly with increased highway traffic density.

------
BuckRogers
There's a lot of obsession with head-on collisions in regards to safety but
there are two things commonly forgotten about. The ability to stop quickly and
rollover risk.

I've always felt a large family sedan like a Ford Taurus was probably the
overall safest thing you could drive. Decent stopping distance, low rollover
risk and lots of crush zone room for modern engineering to absorb impact.

~~~
WWLink
A fully loaded Taurus has all of the safety features (except I'm not sure it
has forward collision warning? I think it does)

It's also based on a Volvo platform. And very comfortable. XD

I have no idea why nobody likes them, but they are awesome 2nd owner cars.

------
cjensen
It looks to me like Consumer Reports did an awful lot of cherry-picking of the
data in that video.

First, it looks to me like they made the collision happen at the max speed the
Malibu could tolerate without collapsing the Malibu's passenger compartment. A
slower collision might have been less catastrophic to the antique. A higher
speed might have been catastrophic to the Malibu.

Second, they picked an old car built before seatbelt introduction and
emphasized that aspect.

Third, they picked an accident type -- frontal offset -- which recent modern
cars have been specifically engineered to handle.

Fourth, note how carefully the video is edited so that you cannot see the
right side of the antique post-crash either overhead or from the side. The
editors didn't want to show _anything_ that would detract from their chosen
message.

Modern cars really are a lot safer and _way_ more reliable than cars when I
was a kid, and I'm grateful for it. When my wife got pregnant, the first thing
I did was sell my 69 Chevy Nova because I felt that to be responsible for my
child, I needed to take care of my life by driving a safer car. All that said,
it irks me that Consumer Reports treated the production and editing of this
film as a propaganda exercise instead of a straight-up tell-the-facts
documentary.

~~~
rtkwe
1) All the tests they do happen at a defined speed, for the front overlap it's
40 MPH [1] which it looks like the video was doing. Can't really fault them
for using their standard tests.

2) It was to show how much better cars have gotten in the 50 years (1959 to
2009 when the video was produced) seat belts didn't even appear as a standard
fitting on a car until 1958 on a Saab.

3) New cars are engineered to handle all the types of crashes that the IIHS
tests for. I don't see your point.

4) The newer car had basically no damage on the opposite side and I doubt the
older car did better than the 2009. It's not shocking at all that the non
involved side of the car wouldn't take much damage. They don't even track the
movement on that side of the car during their tests.

[1] [http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/frontal-
crash-...](http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/frontal-crash-tests)

------
alvern
There is a whole car-culture set around rebuilding these cars to factory spec,
but there was a reason people were putting disc brakes from a '75 in a '56\.
Dual brake (front & rear) was not a mandatory thing until '69.

------
rileymat2
I do not doubt the premise of the video, but there appears to be a large rust
cloud on impact. Did they use a structurally sound old car or did they help
prove their point by using a rusted out car?

~~~
biot
You're seeing the paint (of each car's color) being atomized upon impact.

------
carsongross
This is certainly dramatic, but it is important to realize that the majority
of automobile safety improvements came before 1960:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#/media/File:USA_annual_VMT_vs_deaths_per_VMT.png)

We've become increasingly safety obsessed and jammed more and more expensive
and heavy safety technology into vehicles as the returns have diminished
dramatically.

This is one reason why automobiles all look the same these days, with gigantic
A-pillars, obscured windows views necessitating integrated cameras, and the
universal "fat american" bulging sides appearance.

~~~
mikeash
A linear scale for a graph like that is terribly misleading. The graph looks
almost flat lately, but that's just because it's relatively near zero. Blow
that section up to give it some vertical room and it will tell a different
story.

Edit: just to put some actual numbers on this, Wikipedia says that deaths per
100 million vehicle miles in the US was 1.07 in 2014, and 1.44 in 2004. That's
an improvement of 25% in just the past ten years. You only have to go back 25
years to reach a fatality rate double that of 2014.

~~~
vkou
Not to mention that the death rate is a tailing indicator for safety - there
were a lot more deathtrap junkers from the 70s and 80s on the road in 2004
then there are in 2016.

~~~
mikeash
That's a good point. You could freeze safety at the current model year and
you'd still see significant improvements for another decade or two as older
cars age out of the fleet.

