In photos: How crashing cars makes them safer
We’re on a bus threading along a winding lane through bucolic Virginia countryside. Minutes later, we’re confronted by the carnage from a massive car wreck. Two Chevrolet sedans have collided head-on at a closing speed just shy of 130 km/h. But there’s no blood, no shattered glass littering the road, no emergency crews in attendance. This collision happened six years ago. The corpses of the crashed cars are on display in the lobby of the IIHS Vehicle Research Centre; on its 50th anniversary in 2009, the organization celebrated by staging the head-on collision between a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu and a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air to demonstrate how far we have come. The U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is an NGO funded by the auto-insurance industry, and has arguably done more to advance the crash-worthiness of today’s cars than any government. At its core, it’s driven by commercial self-interest – fewer fatalities and serious injuries means less money paid out on insurance claims. But it’s hard to argue against the collateral benefits to society. We’re the first Canadian journalists to visit the IIHS Vehicle Research Centre, and the visit has been made possible by Subaru Canada. Of course, Subaru has its own ulterior motive: to remind us it’s the only auto maker with IIHS Top Safety Pick ratings for all its models for six straight years; and all but two models have the best-of-the-best Top Safety Pick+ rating earned by the availability of an effective automatic braking system (part of Subaru’s EyeSight system). Fair enough. Founded in 1959, the IIHS actually pre-dates the inauguration of U.S. federal safety standards and mandatory crash testing in the late 1960s. Its practice of testing more rigorously than the feds, and then publicizing the results, has made its tests the de facto benchmark. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sets mandatory standards, explains Raul Arbelaez, vice-president of operations, “but through consumer pressure and not wanting to be left behind, manufacturers do make changes” to ensure good results in the IIHS tests. For example, the current-generation Toyota RAV4 introduced in 2013 was rated Poor in the IIHS small-overlap frontal crash test; Toyota made changes for 2015, and now it gets a Good rating.
It’s true, they really don’t make them like that any more. And that’s a good thing. Despite weighing about 200 pounds lbs more than the 2009 Malibu it hit, despite being built on a “proper” frame, the 1959 Bel Air virtually imploded in the crash. The Bel Air was built seven or eight years before the first U.S. federal standards for vehicle safety were implemented.
The IIHS’s moderate-overlap crash involved both cars moving at 40 mph (64 km/h) and impacting each other with an overlap of 40 per cent of their frontal widths. That differs from the mandatory federal test, which crashes vehicles across their full width and at only 35 mph (56 km/h).
Despite the Bel Air’s greater size and longer hood than the Malibu, the force of the collision has crushed the passenger compartment, thrusting the pedals and the steering wheel backward just as the driver was being thrown forward towards them. All the measurements taken from the car and from the crash-test dummy resulted in worst-possible Poor ratings in all the IIHS evaluations, indicating that the driver would have been seriously injured or killed.Jeremy Sinek
Even the Malibu wouldn’t be state-of-the-art by today’s standards, but the IIHS ratings indicate that the driver would have suffered at most a “possible left-foot injury.” The front structure has collapsed as it’s intended to do – to absorb crash energy and thereby reduce the “suddenness” of the impact – while the passenger compartment is intact. The driver would probably have been able to limp away from the wreckage.Jeremy Sinek
Seating position can greatly influence the impact of a crash, and IIHS’s Raul Arbelaez says auto makers sometimes game the system to achieve better results in the federal tests. For example, NHTSA specifies the seat should be set at mid-travel, so auto makers have been known to give a vehicle an abnormal range of seat travel to ensure that mid-travel positions the seat for optimal the crash-test performance, even though such a seat position would be abnormal in the real world. For its own tests, the IIHS bases seat position on University of Michigan research into where actual drivers position the seat in real life.
Two mainstream minivans from two major auto makers of the same era, but look at the difference in passenger-compartment integrity between the 1997-2004 Pontiac Transport/Chevrolet Venture (above) and the 1998 Toyota Sienna, below. The GM van was one of the worst vehicles ever subjected to the IIHS moderate-overlap test, said Arbelaez – “the closest thing we have to a dinosaur.” After a front-end redesign for 2005, he added, the GM vans (Chevrolet Uplander and its corporate cousins) “had excellent performance – as good as the Sienna in 1998.”Jeremy Sinek
In 2012, the IIHS upped the ante by establishing its small-overlap test that impacts only 25 per cent of the vehicle’s frontal width. Many vehicles that do well in the moderate-overlap test do poorly in the small-overlap, as the outboard portions of the vehicle have less crash-absorbing structure. You can see here how much worse the early Mazda CX-9 on top coped with the test than the Chevrolet Equinox (a smaller vehicle) below. However, when some manufacturers beefed up their structures for the small-overlap test, they did so only on the driver’s side. The institute plans some passenger-side tests to “send a warning shot” to the industry.Jeremy Sinek
These identical Smarts were both crash-tested at 40 mph, yet the one on the left is much more severely damaged. Why? Because the one on the right underwent the standard test into a fixed barrier, which generates crash forces equivalent to hitting another car of the same weight going at the same speed. It performed very well in that standard test. The Smart on the left actually was crashed into another car going the same speed, but the other car was much heavier. Hence the greater damage. “The laws of physics apply no matter what you drive,” says Arbelaez. “The bigger, heavier object is always going to win.”Jeremy Sinek
The IIHS added its own side-impact crash test in 2002, after noting that the federal test failed to reflect the soaring population of pickups and SUVs. The sled-mounted barrier used by the feds (left image) was shaped like a low-to-the-ground passenger car from the early 1970s, so it tended to impact the relatively strong rocker panels of the vehicle being tested. But in the real world, says Arbelaez, the IIHS saw “a disproportion number of injuries to occupants of struck vehicles because trucks ride higher and are heavier, and very few vehicles back then had good structure and side airbags to protect the pelvis and head.” The institute developed its own barrier (right) with a shape that mimicked a light truck.
The hazard posed by increasingly popular light trucks was graphically illustrated by this staged crash between a 1996 Ford Explorer and a 2000 Ford Focus. While the small car’s body-side was crushed, there was virtually no visible damage to the SUV. That red spot is grease-paint from the head of the Focus’s dummy “driver.” The paint is applied to dummies in crash-tests to mark where they impact the car interior … except in this case the dummy’s head was whipped out the side window and left a grapefruit-sized dent on the Explorer’s hood. With better structures and standard side airbags, “we don’t see this any more in modern vehicles,” says Arbelaez. “There’s been a huge leap forward in what even inexpensive vehicles can offer.”Jeremy Sinek
The IIHS doesn’t do rollover tests or rate rollover stability, but it does test roof strength by pushing a plate diagonally against the outer edge of a vehicle’s roof. At a force of 15,000 pounds, lbs the roof of the 2008 Kia Sportage on the right crushed 15 inches while that of the 2009 Volkswagen Tiguan on the left crushed only 1.5 inches. The federal test is being toughened to require the roofs of cars and light trucks to withstand three times their own weight without crushing more than 5 inches; the IIHS has to withstand four times the vehicle’s weight to earn a good rating.Jeremy Sinek