8 Responses to 'New Car Safety vs Old Car Safety'

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1. Ken said,
   
   

   on April 21st, 2008 at 10:03 pm

   I saw these a while ago and I agree that they make for fascinating viewing. There was also a crash between a new model espace with an older model. I think that was a Fifth gear crash test as well. The newer one was 5-star Euro NCAP.
   As a father of 2 children, it does make you think seriously about upgrading. However, the criteria of Cheap ($) and Safe (5-star) and Fun (some performance!) is hard to meet. It’s easier to stick with the current car and keep saving! 🙂

2. Richard said,
   
   

   on April 22nd, 2008 at 7:21 am

   As they say…. they don’t build them like they use to 😉

3. Todd said,
   
   

   on April 22nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm

   check out the safety crash tests of the newer chinese cars for something REALLY scary!

4. Gordon Drennan said,
   
   

   on April 22nd, 2008 at 2:26 pm

   There was a research paper published recently comparing injury records with how many stars the car got in the NCAP crash testing. The results weren’t what the researchers expected. They expected more stars would mean less severe injuries. What they found was that post-NCAP cars do a lot better than pre-NCAP cars, so building cars to make them pass crash tests has worked. But the cars that did better in the NCAP tests, ones that got more stars, didn’t do significantly better in actual real world crashes, except in one specific sort of crash: T-bone crashes.

5. Julian Edgar said,
   
   

   on April 22nd, 2008 at 2:32 pm

   Gordon, do you have a link for that paper?

6. Gordon Drennan said,
   
   

   on April 23rd, 2008 at 10:50 am

   http://www.rsconference.com/roadsafety/detail/634

7. Gordon Drennan said,
   
   

   on April 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 am

   I imagine the response to that paper from the safety people at some car companies was to suggest it proves their oft-made claim that certain other car companies whose cars get more stars than them are getting them by optimising the safety engineering in their cars to do especially well in the specific test that NCAP does rather than to do generally well in the whole range of crashes at a whole range of speeds that occur in the real world.

8. Rick M. said,
   
   

   on April 26th, 2008 at 8:01 am

   I’d like to see a WRC Car go up against something twice it’s size. I’ve seen in-car footage of them hitting trees head on at warp speed without critical injuries to the occupants…

   Race cars have the 3 prong’d approach to safety. Harness, Helmet & Roll Cage. The most important is the helmet. The roll cage is important too, but without the helmets and harnesses, the roll cage will kill you double time!

   It’s kinda funny that wearing helmets in cars isn’t more readily accepted. It’s law on a push bike, but many more people die each year in car crashes…

   also…

   It’s law to have a fence around your pool, but more children are killed in the kitchen each year…

   We humans are not terribly logical at times….