I thought Smart Cars were suppose to be safe.
 

Well, if this picture is not doctored, it seems the smart cars have the same crush problem the SUVs have.

email spam :mad:

that's not even a smart car

Ouch, takeing a closer look.... I wonder what kind of car it is?

Those look like the stock wheels on a chevy malibu.

Besides you can't expect much to survive between two loaded trucks if they have any sort of significant speed.

Snopes to the rescue!

snopes.com: Save the Planet with a Small Car

It's a Ford Escape.

Thanks!
!

OokiiMamoru -

Wow, a Ford Escape! Talk about the big(ger) fish eating the little(r) fish. Two Escapes would squish a Metro, but two trucks squish the Escape.

CarloSW2

Those aren't Ford Escape wheels. Snopes is incorrect, I think.

Christ -

In that case I vote Chevy HHR :

http://ecomodder.com/forum/member-cf...-chevy-hhr.jpg

The wheels match, and the upper red rectangle area "looks" like the back of the HHR to me.

CarloSW2

Christ -

Here's the matching wheel :

http://ecomodder.com/forum/member-cf...-hhr-wheel.jpg

That's not to say that this wheel isn't used on other GM products.

CarloSW2

I did a little more Googling, and people seem to think it's either an HHR or Aveo.

Clev -

That was my "gut feeling" when Frank said it wasn't a Smart. Aveo's have 4-lug bolt patterns, but the crash has a 5-lug wheel, just like the HHR. Soooooooooo, I'm sticking with the HHR.

CarloSW2

Escapes have wheels like that too. From 2009 Ford Escape Pictures

http://o.aolcdn.com/commerce/images/...lcap_Large.jpg

wdb -

The plot thickens!!!!

CarloSW2

I doesn't really matter, it's not a "small car".

I don't give a damn if it was a HUMMER, any car would have been crushed between those two.

Go to Snopes and click on the image, then enlarge it as much as you can. I can get it about 10 steps larger than it's actually posted there b/c of firefox. (CTRL and +). The image isn't as clear or high-res as I'd like to see for this kind of deliberation, but it doesn't seem to have the edge detail on the spokes like the Escape's wheels do, although it does have the 5 spoke and 5 lug with a 60mm +/- center cap.

How could anyone mistake the fine spoked three lugged wheels of a smart car for 5 lug wheels like that?
Either way, two dump trucks full of dirt and the only thing that might save you is another dump truck, so if you want to be really safe drive a dump truck!
Or don't tail gate.

Or always try to leave room ahead for an evasive maneuver and use your rear view mirror when slowing & stopped. Rear crash avoidance is an option!

(I've done it once to get away from a transport truck that had locked its brakes after coming into a construction slowdown behind me with too much speed.)

On the vehicle ID mystery... what about an older Chevy Blazer? Has the rim lip detail the HHR is missing.

http://z.about.com/d/4wheeldrive/1/0...10Blaz_1RR.jpg

Close, but the crushed one doesn't have the 4x4 logo embossed on a spoke, and the Blazer/Jimmy/S10/S15 doesn't have the same center cap profile that the crushed one has.

True and true. The mystery deepens.

(OK, it doesn't deepen. It just continues.)

I haven't found a Malibu wheel that looks even remotely close to that, other than having 5 spokes...

cfg83 - The HHR's wheel is missing the lip detail, as MetroMPG suggested, but it's close.

I'm going to stay with the Ford Escape idea until we can find a wheel that fits better (It's not VolksWagen either, already checked) because well, we can't just challenge stuff without evidence to the contrary, and though the wheel doesn't look precisely like an Escape wheel, it also doesn't look entirely different (a la "Smart" idea). This same pic went through another forum with people claiming that it was a Prius... In fact, I think it was the Chrysler MiniVan Fan Club.

I for one think the post title is kinda stupid really, regardless of the car.

"i thought they were supposed to be safe" implies that there has EVER been ANY passenger car that guarantees your safety in the event of two, 20 ton commercial trucks tailgating each other with you in between.

Nothing in life is a guarantee of safety, and you can die in ANY car. Death and taxes are your guarantees... the rest is all up to chance and choice. I just find myself literally annoyed at the implication of the topic title that somehow it's disappointing to the OP that a "safe" car would be crushed in that circumstance.

I just chose to ignore that particular feeling by telling myself that safety, like almost everything in the world, is relative.

I'm sure the OP meant nothing by it, other than circumstantial hilarity at the expense of the apparent lack of safety of "whatever" vehicle was involved, given the obvious extreme circumstances.

Do all of you still feel safe sitting at a light with your engine off?

:rolleyes:

For that matter, do you still feel safe sitting in a parking space along side the road with your engine off, or should you have started the engine with remote start before getting into the car?

MazdaMatt -

Two weeks ago my co-worker got rear-ended while sitting at a stop light with the engine on. Categorically the fault of the rear-ender, who I think *was* on the phone. This is the second time this has happened to him, so he doesn't feel safe. You can prevent 90%, but that extra 10% is our of your hands.

CarloSW2

I would not feel safe if I was not aware of what is going on around me at all times while I'm operating my car. Whether the engine is running or not doesn't matter much to me.

I chastised the sender of this junk when I got it a couple of days before this thread.

It falls squarely into the category of neo-con spam.

I'm sure you've all gotten an avalanche of this sort of **** over the years. :rolleyes:

It's all the same. Attempt to mislead/deceive by presenting something along with fundamentally flawed "facts", along with fundamentally flawed "conclusions". These can be outright lies and fabrications and/or, a bit sneakier, lies of omission.

At any rate, I find it interesting that after all these years, I can't recall getting garbage of this nature from the "Lib" side.

Oh yes, you sure wouldn't think the simple physics of a car/truck crash is political; it shouldn't be. But there is always that agenda that goes along with neocon spam distortions; in this case, it is the anti-small car/plant your ass in a giant SUV agenda.

What does the originator of this hope to gain by saying it's a Smart car, when it ain't?

I've told many people over the years that when I get that junk from them, it stops with me.

Why propogate it?

What do you get out of spreading lies?

Don't you ever get tired of being proven wrong??? I always "snopes 'em" or otherwise blow that junk out of the water.

Man, if I was wrong as often as they are, I'd be quite unhappy. And ashamed.

If you look closely at the wheels in the photo there appears to be a shallow indentation down the middle of the lower 3 spokes of the wheel. Now look at this stock photo of a 2004 chevy malibu:

http://www.autobytel.com/images/carP...yMalibuLT2.jpg

Looking at the wheels on the chevy malibu you can see the indentations down the middle. If you look at the front wheel on the stock photo you can see the very topmost spoke appears to be completely smooth because of the lighting. I think that the wheel is very much similar in the accident photo. I may just be crazy though, lol

My favorite ones are the ones that say, "I verified this on Snopes, and it's true!" That's a sure sign that it's wrong and sure enough, Snopes denies it.

I'm to the point now where I'm going to start bcc'ing everybody that was on the original thread when I reply.

I don't see any indents in the snope's pics... and I've enlarged them to like 300% and looked. They're fairly smooth/straight spokes.

LOL, we must be a bunch of car nuts.

Yes, do you feel safe traveling at speeds in excess of 60mph even though 90% of headons at that speed still result in either instant or eventual death from injuries?

Absolutely I feel safe sitting at a light with the engine off.

What are ya gonna do, squirt out into traffic that is going in a different vector, resulting in an even worse collision? :rolleyes:

I'm paying attention to my mirrors when I'm stopped, if there aren't already several vehicles stopped behind me. Doesn't take a second to have the engine going again if I want it.

(Frank: there are often other options than squirting into oncoming/cross traffic to avoid a rear crash. Not always, but often. And the number of options increases the smaller the vehicle you're driving, ironically, given the misleading title of this thread.)

Hi,

I have a suggestion for some intrepid person: contact the police department in this city and ASK what kind of car this was! [Edit: Or, contact Snopes and ask them about their source(s).]

Aside from Snope's suggestion, and spending some time to figure out exactly where it is by the vehicles in the area, how exactly would you go about contacting those police?

While you're trying to identify cars by their wheels... http://www.car-accidents.com/2007-cr...07-fatal-1.gif
, maybe it's a VW Cross Fox ;).

You know, as a non-liberal who has pretty much always driven small cars (from my Austin-Healey Sprite to the current Insight), I really object to this. It's a prime example of tunnel vision: you don't like neo-cons, for instance, so you find some unrelated view - unsafe small cars, for instance, then try to tar them all with that brush.

There are, judging from the evidence of bumper stickers, an awful lot of SUV-loving liberals in this part of the country. My favorite, seen in the early days of the Iraq invasion, was a new (still in temporary plates) Cadillac Escalade with "No Blood For Oil" plastered on the bumper.

I have to agree with you on this...^