Tee hee. I drive my ‘classic’ vintage car to Burning Man, then drive it home. I hit it with a self-service car wash in Fallon, and replace the air cleaner. It’s a stinkin’ CAR, not a museum piece!
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That looked like a small overlap crash too - one of the newer crash tests notable for its brutality.
While I can was nostalgic all day about the rock solid tanks of old, is amazing how much safer today’s cars are. Dude driving the 59 Malibu would have probably been killed.
I remember listening to a Car Talk where someone called in about possibly buying a 60s Volkswagen bus, and regarding safety one of them joked that the crumple zone consisted of your legs.
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That’s the thing about modern cars… thanks to the NHTSA and Ralph Nader and mostly Volvo, we have cars that are actually designed around safety. Volvo was a leader in this. I used to have a 1964 Volvo with shoulder belts. They also focused on crumple zones many years before the American carmakers were forced to do it.
If you want to see what it was like before then, visit Shorpy and look at their series of Oakland car crashes from the fifties. The picture aren’t gruesome, but you can use your imagination to feel the pain of being in a crash back then.
I have owned three Volvo wagons. Two older ones from the 80s, and one was an 850 like that one, and they were all beasts in their own way. None ever failed to bring me home, and each was cursed with very small swedish electrical demons.
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A striking example of how an utterly crushed 1959 Bel Air is still somehow more aesthetically pleasing than a pre-collision 2009 Malibu.
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Your corpse may not be pretty but at least your coffin will be!
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Well, in the context of Burning Man, you might be towing the car behind your giant RV, so you’d have a home on the playa and also a smaller vehicle for driving into town. Or, you might just be concerned that the classic car was insufficiently safe or comfortable at high speed and not want to drive it long distances on the highway. Or both.
Marry, 'tis true. It’s no wonder that so many of them have the spare tire mounted in front, just beneath the windshield. Absent that “protection,” there’s naught between your knees and the Mansfield bar of the semi-truck ahead of you but some gaily-painted sheet metal and perhaps some colorful daisy stickers.
Tsk. I’m with nixiebunny. Drive it or sell it.
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I once had a conversation about cars with a work colleague when she remarked that she preferred older cars because they didn’t crumple up so much in a crash like newer ones. She was interpreting the crumple zones as a sign of shoddy materials. I have to admit I was dismayed at her interpretation. I had to put it in perspective though when remembering that she had also told me she didn’t get the influenza vaccination as she wanted her body to have natural immunity (she’s a nurse who works with over 65s in inpatient hospital wards unfortunately).
*Must hold in tirade*
I hope nobody dies because of her ignorance.
It’s mandated by law in my state that you have to be current for everything, and get the influenza vaccine and a TB test if you work in a healthcare environment.
The employer is also supposed to pay for that stuff too. But the time I contracted for a hospital, they never reimbursed me. They also didn’t allow me to go through this rigamarole in their facility, instead telling me to take unpaid leave to go and get my shots and tests from my PCP, then bring back documentation for them. I should have sued the lying bastards. I never turn down a chance for getting a vaccination. It’s like being given a damn superpower. “I’m immune-sufficiency man! Able to fight off Tetanus without a single lockjaw episode!”
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Where I think @David1 puts it wrongly is to state that because one can’t look at a chart of annual road deaths and tell when seatbelt laws were introduced, it’s persuasive that seatbelts don’t reduce road deaths; I’d agree with you that that doesn’t demonstrate anything. (Quite apart from the underlying trend towards greater road safety, seatbelt laws in the UK were introduced at the same time as more stringent drink-driving laws: have fun picking the confounders out of that.)
But the fact he used a fallacious argument doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Wildly optimistic claims were made by politicians before the seatbelt laws were introduced (which is common enough when trying to push laws through); afterwards, while overall road deaths continued their downward trend, two points were noted: firstly that reduced driver deaths (which were credited to the new seatbelt law) seemed to occur mostly among late-night drinkers, and secondly that the general trend towards safety was reversed for pedestrians and cyclists, who suffered more deaths and injuries than before the legislation.
While it’s very likely that seatbelts make car occupants safer, there’s some evidence that feeling safer encourages behavior which increases risk, both for drivers and disproportionately for other road users. And @David1’s point cuts both ways: if it’s incumbent on proposers of a safety measure to make a clear case of overall benefit, would you be confident that it can be done? I don’t mean this in some teach-the-controversy way: I’m genuinely interested in how strong the evidence would be.
Honestly, that’s the most impressive bit(at least to me): I assume that alloys and materials have improved since the 1959 model; but it’s not as though the 2009 wins by being made of radically superior materials; it’s just that all the crumpling, bending, shearing, shattering, and assorted other stress phenomena don’t happen right into the driver.
Neither model comes out of the crash looking particularly salvageable; but the 2009 gruesomely fails in on itself, while the '59 gruesomely fails in on you.
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How many counts of negligent homicide is that?
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Always wonder how many classic/antique/expensive cars are wrecked for a movie. Latest Bond flick totaled three Aston Martins for a rollover shot. Maybe now CG is more common, though.
The impact on mortality may not have been as dramatic as expected, but seatbelt laws have made hideous windshield lacerations to the face and upper body much, much rarer and car occupants who are restrained in the vehicle are generally less injured than those who are ejected.
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That’s how much modern cars improved yet speed limits are still stuck in the 50s.
Umm because speed limits are about weather, road conditions,and human reaction time way way way more than crashworthiness. Also that was probably a low speed like 35mph crash. At 50+mph head on even modern cars come out looking pretty bad.
And you came here just to complain about speed limits?
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not even cyclists as reason for all car-related issues were mentioned
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