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How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

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Re: How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

#241

Post by VRay »

hansvm wrote: post #131
fractionalhare wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a typo, or do you teally mean cycling and walking are significantly worse than traveling by car? Are both of those activities actually more dangerous? I would have thought cycling and walking - even in urban settings! - are safer activities than driving, statistically.

I doubt it was a typo. As a ballpark, cycling has 10x the deaths per mile as driving. Here in the Bay nobody stops at stop signs (3-10mph is typical), and they don't even really slow down to look both ways till after the white line and after the sign -- plowing straight into sidsewalks and bike lanes. I'm honestly shocked it doesn't cause more deaths. Cyclists themselves usually aren't much better -- not even botheri…

Anything involving cars is probably the biggest ongoing nightmare in our society. People have no appreciation for the danger they're constantly putting themselves and everyone around them in, just to save a few minutes a month in commute time.

The news, social media, etc should be plastered with the 100+ people who needlessly die every day in car accidents. ALERT: 10 YEAR OLD CHILD SLAIN SO DRIVER COULD GET TO WORK 30 SECONDS EARLIER

(Side note: This is why I'm going long on the stock market again.. it looks like the public and the media have gotten over being scared of the virus. Even if we have another 100-200k deaths in the USA this year, my guess is it'll get swept under the rug just like 50k car deaths, regular flu deaths, heart attacks, etc)

Re: How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

#242

Post by nelaboras »

YetAnotherMatt wrote: post #147
hangonhn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more about the walking part? Is it because pedestrians get hit by cars a lot? Otherwise it seems walking should be incredibly safe.

Like some of the other comments already mentioned, its indeed on a per distance basis. Also traffic accidents are far more deathly if you're walking basically naked from a safety perspective vs protected by a well designed mass of metal. When a car and a human collide, it's not the driver that's likely to die. I got my stats from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort which shows walking approx 12 times as dangerous…

That depends on many factors. Living in a crowded European city I have plenty of shops in walking distance, protected sidewalks and a traffic nightmare. It would take me longer and I'd be much more likely to get into an accident when driving to any of the shops nearby; walking is easier and safer. If you have a city designed for cars like most US cities seem to be the story is very different.

Per se walking is definitely safer, given decent walking conditions. If all you got are sidewalk-less streets and only big shops that are a decent distance away, that's not the fault of walking but of bad city design. similarly in winter, if there's snow and your city clears the street but not the sidewalk then of course the sidewalk is less safe.

Re: How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

#243

Post by AmericanChopper »

wscott wrote: post #30

The article reminds me of a story from a friend that was an engineer at a major water heater company. Modern electric water heaters are already fairly efficient, but every model gets tested by the government to be given an efficiency rating. The test consists of replacing the anode with a rod that has a series of temperature probes to measure the water at different levels in the water heater. Since water would form l…

Reminds me of the Ferrari fuel injection controversy in F1 last season. The gist of it is the theory that Ferrari were cheating the maximum fuel injection rates, by tuning their injection system to inject more fuel when the injection sensor wasn’t taking a reading.

https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/analysis-fia-settlement-f...

Re: How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

#244

Post by dredmorbius »

esja wrote: post #230
dredmorbius wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are several such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws Though I'm not aware of a law stating that for any given principle there is an existing eponymous law.

Haven’t you heard of DredMorbius’s Law of Eponymity?

But bananamerica really discovered it.

... oh, wait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

Re: How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

#246

Post by x87678r »

csours wrote: post #182
x87678r wrote: post #37

There must be stats for injuries or deaths by car. Is it public?

Must there be? One would imagine that there should be, but comparing over time and from different jurisdictions is quite difficult. What is the baseline? Many car accidents never get reported to any official body (single car accidents, fender benders). How do you classify an injury? I was involved in an incident that looked quite horrifying if you looked at the cars, but no injuries were reported at the time.

Yeah its a problem too that not all cars are driven the same. Sports cars will have more accidents than family cars as they're driven more agressively. Cars with 4WD in the snow probably crash more often than 2WD ones in the sun belt, but you can't say they're more dangerous.

Re: How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

#247

Post by notriddle »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #25
laegooose wrote: post #5

The whole car safety topic is very confusing. Car accidents is top1-top2 death reason in US for people in 20-40 age group [1]. Probably less in Europe but still one of the leading ones. I was thinking about how I can make myself safer. Which car brand/model is better? Which seat is better for passenger? How much riskier it is to drive during the night? In the rain? How dangerous is it to overtake on road with 1 lane…

Driving is already incredibly safe. Yes, it's the leading cause of death in those age categories, but there are 3-4 trillion miles driven each year in the USA. That comes out to 1 death every 100 million miles.

But cities designed for cars encourage people to go farther. The distances that people go are not a fixed quantity.

Re: How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

#248

Post by ajzinsbwbs »

globular-toast wrote: post #161
jbay808 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the "let's defect in a prisoner's dilemma" strategy that works great until others use it too.

It is not the prisoner's dilemma at all. If everyone gets big cars then everyone is equally as safe. They don't all die. For crying out loud, people, I know it's stupid, I know it's wrong, but it's the truth. It's an uncomfortable truth that your downvoting will not change.

Is that really true? If two big cars hit each other there’s a lot more energy in the collision than two small cars.

Re: How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

#249

Post by kube-system »

x87678r wrote: post #246
csours wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must there be? One would imagine that there should be, but comparing over time and from different jurisdictions is quite difficult. What is the baseline? Many car accidents never get reported to any official body (single car accidents, fender benders). How do you classify an injury? I was involved in an incident that looked quite horrifying if you looked at the cars, but no injuries were reported at the time.

Yeah its a problem too that not all cars are driven the same. Sports cars will have more accidents than family cars as they're driven more agressively. Cars with 4WD in the snow probably crash more often than 2WD ones in the sun belt, but you can't say they're more dangerous.

> Sports cars will have more accidents than family cars as they're driven more agressively.

Surprisingly, that's not always the case. Particularly with higher dollar sports cars, which might commonly be driven only for pleasure and with limited mileage.

Re: How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?

#250

Post by Marsymars »

im3w1l wrote: post #129
cybrjoe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, how is this different from what VW did? There was a lot of talk about complicit engineers vs. shady management in that discussion. Did this ever make it to production?

Many important differences. 1. Actively detecting test and behaving differently. It's like stealing a test vs teaching to the test. 2. Lower stakes. Health issues are much more serious than inefficiency. 3. It affects the buyer. It's more acceptable for the buyer to be cheated than everyone around them. 4. People could have created these layers by accident. Favouring those who got lucky is unfair. Honestly I think ba…

> Honestly I think basically all my gadgets exaggerate how energy efficient they are, by tuning parameters for tests that don't correspond to the real world.

Having measured all my gadgets with a Kill a Watt meter, that's not my experience. It seems that many gadget-makers realize that people don't really care about power draw, so they just slap the maximum draw onto the specs.

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