05-23-2009
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Moderator
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Member Since: Aug 2004
Location: PA
Posts: 5,251
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Re: Obama's CAFE Standards May Put More Lives in Danger
Quote:
Originally Posted by Maat222
Smaller cars automatically have a better strength to weight ratio, so don't need as much structural steel in relation to over all weight.
It is the same reason why an ant can carry 100 times its body weight, and we can't.
Smaller is automatically stronger.
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Perhaps you'd like to run your theory by the National Research Council. During their studies, they've found conventional wisdom holds true; that bigger and heavier vehicles are safer;
Quote:
The potential problem for motor vehicle safety is the vehicle mass and size vary inversely not only with fuel economy, but also with risk of crash injuries. When a heavy vehicle strikes an object, it is more likely to move or deform the object than is a light vehicle. Therefore the heavier vehicle’s occupants decelerate less rapidly and are less likely to be injured. Decreasing mass means that the downsized vehicle’s occupants experience higher forces in collisions with other vehicles. Vehicle size is also important. Larger crush zones outside the occupant compartment increase the distance over which the vehicle and its restrained occupants are decelerated. Larger interiors mean more space for restraint systems to effectively prevent hard contact between the occupant’s bodies and the structures of the vehicle. There is also an empirical relationship, historically, between vehicle mass/size and rollover injury likelihood.
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In short, even after considering effects on all road users and after adjusting the results for a number of factors known to correlate with both fatal crash risk and vehicle usage patterns, the downsizing and downweighting of the vehicle fleet that occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s still appear to have imposed a substantial safety penalty in terms of lost lives and additional injuries. The typical statistical relationship between injuries and fatalities in the NHTSA’s accident data suggests that these changes in the fleet were responsible for an additional 13,000 to 26,000 incapacitating injuries and 97,000 to 195,000 total injuries in 1993.
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Effectiveness and Impact of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards
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