Given the sledgehammer test, at least from the side that thing will be very aggressive in a crash. As in, if it runs into you, or if you run into it you will be more injured and/or dead. You generally want a little give on the road in both directions.
It's more than a belief... the statistics bear it out.
"The lowest 2015 death rate by vehicle type is for very large SUVs: 13 deaths per million registered vehicles. The highest is for mini cars: 64 deaths per million registered vehicles."
https://www.edmunds.com/car-safety/are-smaller-cars-as-safe-...
That could just mean SUV drivers drive less, or a myriad of other things. PG posted on Twitter a while back a study that showed SUVs were _less_ safe (per mile driven? I think).
This is a very simple matter of physics. Do you know what typically kills in a car crash? Extreme G-forces generated by near instantaneous deceleration. Big, heavy things have to expend more energy to decelerate, so they tend to do so at a relatively slower rate. Small things can be stopped very quickly. Therefore, someone in a big, heavy SUV is going to have much higher chances of survival than someone in a Mini.
But the article was from 2003, unfortunately. Searching online I can't find statistics per mile driven, which is what you need to made the claims the replies to my posts are making.
It means that F=ma - the bigger you are, the safer you are. The driver of a small 2 seater car is going to be worse off than a huge semi if they both collide.
I think a perception of additional personal safety is definitely a reason people like SUVs.
But you can be super safe while still helping protect your crash partners. You can often improve both your and your crash partner's safety with more crumple zones.
I don't think the patrons of this thing are going to be thinking about this much.
I'm not in the field; I just picked it up from the wikipedia page. They call it the "crash partner vehicle". Searching reveals that's what it's sometimes called in the vehicle safety industry.
There's also strain in an inelastic collision. More strain = less acceleration = more living. Super rigid structure = less train = more acceleration = less living. No doubt the airbags and whatnot will make this very safe from the inside. I'm just worried about from the outside. But whatever. Not too worried. Plus, who knows, maybe they did design in strategic crumple zones. They never said they didn't. Just got me worried with the sledge.
At least in principle, modern cars should be getting better at not running into things to begin with. The most survivable crash is one that didn't happen because HAL stepped in at the last minute to apply the brakes or stabilize the vehicle.
Disagree? Why? Active crash-avoidance aids seem to be getting pretty impressive.
Yep, if you're going to crash, better to be in as big a vehicle as possible. There is an argument to be made that smaller, more nimble, faster braking vehicles have a better chance of avoiding the crash in the first place, but the statistics do still show SUVs are safer overall, not just on a per-crash basis.
That works until you encounter a concrete wall or solid telegraph pole.
It also is unfair to those you share the road with to embark on an arms race “who can afford the heaviest car”, if only because pedestrians and cyclists will always lose that race.
Unfortunately, a vehicle can only be as nimble as its driver is. Most vehicles out there are driven by average, distracted, exhausted humans.
About this time last year, I skidded and lost control of my car for a fraction of a second while changing lanes on a busy highway at 60mph. I'm alive and typing this not because I was nimble enough to recover from that situation, but because my car had electronic stability control -- a feature that is often not available in smaller models -- and a good set of winter tires.
It depends on the country. ESC became mandatory in most large markets since sometime between 2012 and 2014, but lots of cars are older than that. Unlike phones, automobiles can easily last 15 years or more if well cared for. Which is great in one respect but also a nightmare when it comes to safety and emissions.
Broadly speaking, active safety systems in any industry are generally considered less reliable than passive ones due to things like software bugs, unforeseen circumstances, malicious tampering, power outages, etc.
But hey, that's why we're both here, right, shooting the shit on a site called "Hacker News." Because we believe there are -- and will continue to be -- better ways to do things through the appropriate application of technology.
Right? If your bio isn't a joke, you'd better darned well have that attitude. Otherwise I don't see how you'd get through a typical workday.
Bio's not a joke, I actually design nuclear reactors. In fact, my experience in that field is why I believe what I said above.
The SL-1 nuclear reactor accident (possibly murder-suicide) happened because a human was actively actuating a control rod by hand and pulled it out too fast. Passive systems that limit rod withdrawal rate are better.
The Three Mile Island accident happened because a sensor mislead the human operators, who then did the wrong thing and ended up dropping the coolant level below the core, which subsequently partially melted. Passive safety systems like a pool of low-pressure coolant preclude this entire class of accidents.
Chernobyl happened because humans could and did manually disable all the automatic safety systems that told them the reactor was in an unstable configuration. Passively safe reactors can't physically get into unstable configurations.
Fukushima had active cooling systems powered by diesel generators. After the earthquake, they started up and worked fine. But when the tsunami came, it flooded the basement. The operators for god knows what reason put the fuel supply and electric switches in the basement, which flooded. The active safety systems failed, the coolant boiled, and the cores melted. As with TMI, passively safe reactors with low-pressure coolant and/or natural-circulation driven decay heat removal (i.e. no diesel backup power needed) would preclude this condition.
The nuclear industry is very into passive safety features, from experience. The first true passive safety demos happened in Idaho in April 1986 (weeks before Chernobyl) at a reactor called the EBR-II.
In summary, making a system safer with active systems is one approach. It's often both more elegant, more reliable, and cheaper to improve a system passively via design ingenuity. Thus, passive safety has a place here at Hacker News.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_incompatibility
Looks sweet though.