Quote:
Originally Posted by ksa8907
These are real world results though, how often is someone going to wreck their car at 45mph at an exact location on the vehicle with no outside variables being involved and into a fixed object.
Obviously a lot of "tests" are really marketing schemes, but either way these are the accidents that are happening every day. Some asshole running a red light and creaming a minivan with a family of 4 inside.
|
I wasn't talking specifically about a small overlap versus a big overlap test... but a weighted test crashing two vehicles together.
The point is, crashing a car against an immovable barrier is the worst case scenario for that particular closing speed.
Crashing a car against another car, as the IIHS did, will give you a different result... depending on what the "other" car is. I find it rather funny when a safety advocate crashes two non-identical cars together and declares one safer because it received less damage. Duh. Physics dictates that the larger car transfers greater force to whatever it hits... which is why the other car receives more damage.
What they didn't demonstrate is what happens when you crash that larger car
against another large car, to show whether that large car can withstand being hit with
the same amount of force that the smaller car was subjected to.
Never thought much of that "crash test" before, until I realized how they were padding those numbers, intentionally or not.
TL;DR: Take what the IIHS dishes out with a grain of salt. Their small overlap test is a actually a very good idea, an indicator of what might actually happen in a car-to-car crash in situations not covered by standard head-on and modest overlap tests... and forces manufacturers to further develop crash safety than to design cars specifically to pass tests. But their release of statistics and stunts like the car-to-car test come with a lot of caveats.
-
Also: RE: Marketing exercises... NCAP. While homogenizing crash safety requirements between regions via NCAP is a good idea, there's a lot of politics and strong-arming happening behind the scenes as NCAP pushes its business model (and yes, it's a business) onto developing markets.