Many serious accidents are single car crashes (more than half here). And a lot of collisions that aren’t officially your fault you can still avoid if you pay attention.
I think that if we include all driving habits, single car crashes, observation selection we will get probably 1 in 10 difference, but I still surprised by 1 to 1000 difference in fatalities between most dangerous and most safe cars.
I think that also weight is very important factor: heavier cars are much safer.
Heavier cars are safer for the people in the heavier cars, and more dangerous for others with whom they may collide.
This produces a sort of evolutionary arms race in the direction of larger heavier cars, making everyone less safe overall.
(Other changes in car design have made them much safer over the years. Today’s cars are much safer than those of, say, 30 years ago. But not, I think, because they are heavier.)
While at first I thought to agree with you, I have a counterexample. Bigger car is safer if it collides with a wall, small ones and bikes are more dangerous in this case, because they result in quicker deceleration of the driver.
So longer cars are also safer, and longer car tends to be heavy ones. So if all cars will be large we will get safer driving environment.
So it is easy to imagine “absolutely” safe car: it would be large, heavy and very slow (like 30 miles per hour).
Maybe bigger cars are safer if they hit walls, but it’s not entirely obvious to me. The more massive the car, the faster it will still be going when its front crumple zone finishes crumpling and wall and windscreen make contact; isn’t that bad? Slower driver deceleration isn’t a good thing if the still-fast-moving driver starts colliding with bricks.
Anyway, most car accidents don’t involve hitting walls, and many car accidents endanger people other than the occupants of the cars, which means more mass ⇒ more danger.
A more massive car has more energy to dissipate but also more structure (crumple zones) to apply this energy to. The net balance is not obvious me, either.
While most car accidents do not involve hitting walls, a lot involve hitting objects-other-than-cars (guard railings, trees, animals, etc.) where being heavy can be an advantage (because that excess energy that you have you dissipate into the object). As to pedestrians, the mass discrepancy is big enough to not matter—the consequences to the pedestrian of being hit by a 1-tonne car are the same as being hit by a 2-tonne car.
Many serious accidents are single car crashes (more than half here). And a lot of collisions that aren’t officially your fault you can still avoid if you pay attention.
I think that if we include all driving habits, single car crashes, observation selection we will get probably 1 in 10 difference, but I still surprised by 1 to 1000 difference in fatalities between most dangerous and most safe cars.
I think that also weight is very important factor: heavier cars are much safer.
Heavier cars are safer for the people in the heavier cars, and more dangerous for others with whom they may collide.
This produces a sort of evolutionary arms race in the direction of larger heavier cars, making everyone less safe overall.
(Other changes in car design have made them much safer over the years. Today’s cars are much safer than those of, say, 30 years ago. But not, I think, because they are heavier.)
While at first I thought to agree with you, I have a counterexample. Bigger car is safer if it collides with a wall, small ones and bikes are more dangerous in this case, because they result in quicker deceleration of the driver.
So longer cars are also safer, and longer car tends to be heavy ones. So if all cars will be large we will get safer driving environment.
So it is easy to imagine “absolutely” safe car: it would be large, heavy and very slow (like 30 miles per hour).
Maybe bigger cars are safer if they hit walls, but it’s not entirely obvious to me. The more massive the car, the faster it will still be going when its front crumple zone finishes crumpling and wall and windscreen make contact; isn’t that bad? Slower driver deceleration isn’t a good thing if the still-fast-moving driver starts colliding with bricks.
Anyway, most car accidents don’t involve hitting walls, and many car accidents endanger people other than the occupants of the cars, which means more mass ⇒ more danger.
A more massive car has more energy to dissipate but also more structure (crumple zones) to apply this energy to. The net balance is not obvious me, either.
While most car accidents do not involve hitting walls, a lot involve hitting objects-other-than-cars (guard railings, trees, animals, etc.) where being heavy can be an advantage (because that excess energy that you have you dissipate into the object). As to pedestrians, the mass discrepancy is big enough to not matter—the consequences to the pedestrian of being hit by a 1-tonne car are the same as being hit by a 2-tonne car.
The 2-tonne car may be harder to stop or steer so that it doesn’t kill the pedestrian.
Being lighter is better in that case.
Why?