Quote:
Originally Posted by Air-Hybrid
No one's going to try to deny that, on like-for-like cars, having more safety features will add more weight, are they?
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As a matter of fact, I'll argue just that. See for instance the Wenzel & Ross analysis (figure 6) of the increased safety of lighter unibody SUVs over their body-on-frame counterparts, or the analysis (firgure 5) of driver safety in Japanese & German cars versus US & Korean models of the same weight.
It's not a simple matter of more mass increasing safety, even apart from such things as size & handling. It's what the engineers do with the mass that matters. To take an extreme case, do you suppose adding a couple thousand pounds of lead bricks in the trunk would make a car safer? At the other end, we could imagine something like the Ariel Atom, with basically all the weight devoted to a roll cage-like frame (which could be made of titanium & carbon fiber to decrease weight still further). Which would have better crash safety? Or you might consider how many Formula I drivers manage to walk away from spectacular high-speed crashes.