Acura TL's good crash test rating

Accord, esp w 6-cylinder engines but probably all have basically the same front framework, afaik.

I've been watching the Mercedes and others for years moving the front wheels to the very corner of the bodywork, where any accident is going to bend the suspension. And now, it turns out, the driver, too.

A lot of the tiny cars are going to suffer from this as well, the Fiats and Mini-Coopers. Have to get a hundred pounds of steel out ahead of the tires old-school. Not sure how even the Civics are going to do on this kind of test.

J.

cameo wrote in news:k0f69b$5gu$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

European Accord, a model thet's otherwise not sold here.

Honda has two "Accord" platforms: the "European" and the "American". The American one is larger and is one that's sold as an "Accord" here.

What are you afraid of? Isn't it a good news that buying the much cheaper Accord gives you the same protection as the Acura TL?

Now Mercedes is protesting the method of the crash test. The results must be just a bit embarrassing for them, I guess.

Thanks, Tegger. So how is that model called in Europe? Interesting though, that Honda (just as Ford used to) think that Americans can be satisfied with lesser models than Europeans.

cameo wrote in news:k0h57a$85e$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Honda Accord.

A lot of that has to do with regulations. Half the cars in Europe cannot be sold here in any case because they don't meet American safety regulations, and the expected market isn't big enough to justify the cost of compliance.

Remember that the European market itself is entirely shaped by their own regulations, which have the effect of making that market's cars a lot smaller than they otherwise might be. And small cars tend to be a hard sell over here.

no, you're thinking TSX.

TL is a US Accord wearing a more expensive suit.

"Elmo P. Shagnasty" wrote in news:elmop- snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

You're right. My mistake.

Afraid of what? I'm a little afraid of corner-collisions, and that zippy-looking but probably ill-advised design is one of about 50,000 reasons I don't buy the Merc or even cheaper models with the same design.

I don't know that it's a huge safety problem but it has to be a fairly large insurance problem, a relatively minor collision is going to make the care unrepairable, unless the frame has replaceable sections which I strongly doubt.

J.

you're falling for the bull injection dude. go to a junkyard. look at some crashed cars. the ones you see [frod, g.m.] with collapsed passenger cells, those are the ones to avoid. the ones you see getting all f'ed up all over but that keep an intact passenger cell, they're the ones you want. ignore all this "insurance rating" f[r]iction.

regarding any mercedes fud, the fact is, germans are experts at high speed crashes. especially late at night on country roads when they've been drinking. german cars are consequentially very good in real world crash performance. all this b.s. about more and more esoteric ways of "testing" cars so they end up getting heavier and heavier is merely the back-door means by which the oilco's manage to keep consumption high when improving engine efficiency would otherwise be starving their sorry asses.

oh, and don't forget the dirty little secret of the "safer" car world - a 3500lb car on a set of 225 wide tires has a much longer stopping distance than a 2300lb car on the same size tires. all this extra weight is /increasing/ crash propensity because of poorer maneuverability and longer stopping distances.

Sorry, in my haste I misidentified that AFAIK acronym.

I have a feeling that despite the protestation, Mercedes will be in a hurry to strengthen those corners.

I seem to remember seeing a photo awhile back; left side is Ford pickup with seriously bent passenger cell (you could tell the driver would have taken a hurting), right side is Smart car with destroyed front but unbent passenger cell complete with functioning door, looked like the passenger would have walked away.

The point of the photo was to show that just because you have a bunch of mass around you, that doesn't mean you're safe--nor does lack of mass mean you're unsafe. It's all in the engineering.

indeed.

the pic you're thinking of is probably this one:

frod have a bunch of very smart and very capable engineers with all the computer modeling horsepower they need to build whatever they want, and have had so for decades. the problem is that frod's policy in crash survival is that they want the frame to fail because it ensures the vehicle is unrepairable and thus they get to sell a new one. they design it so that the "crumple zone" complies with the absolute bare legal minimum, and no more. any further deformation takes place outside the crumple zone, and that starts to extend into other parts of the frame. oh, and trucks don't have to comply with the same level of passenger safety regulations as cars, so as they're not required to, they don't!

Yeah, I still don't believe that in the least. What I suspect you have there are some side-by-side tests where the vehicles were run into walls, certainly not into each other. Show me the readouts for the crash test dummies in each.

If Ford is building big trucks out of recycled toothpaste tubes, well, I wouldn't be shocked. And I suppose having a strong passenger compartment is in general a better thing than not. But you need a bunch of crashable, crushable mass in front of you, or else you're just running into a wall with no cushion, which isn't much fun either. The physics of the collision won't go away, the energy to decelerate you has to go somewhere.

Yes I want safe, but repairable matters too, and a lot more often, and all day long to my insurance company. Though frankly you probably pay a bigger theft premium on the Merc than repairability.

J.

yeah, that's the one. Mini Cooper.

Crashing a TL would probably improve its looks.

what's not to "believe"?

and of course, they're crashed into solid objects not each other. how else do you think these so-called "safety" tests get to ruin otherwise perfectly good cars so that their manufacturers have to make them heavier and heavier so they suck more gas?

no, they make them out of steel, but they design the frame to have stress concentrations that exceed yield at very low impact speeds. it's "good for business" to have frames that irreparably bend because the customer blames themselves and frod get to sell a new vehicle, or at least, parts for another used one and then someone else buys a new one. come to a junkyard with me some time and i'll show you where and how the failure points get designed in. when you see where they choose to put them, as opposed to the other locations that would achieve the same energy absorption objectives, but not ruin the frame in the same way, and you'll understand when i say this is deliberate corporate "profit before consumer safety" engineering.

energy = force x distance moved. but if the [yield] force is low, distance moved isn't going to save you. small and well designed beats big and "poorly" [read: with the company's financial interests, not the consumer's safety in mind"] designed any day.

all true, but if the vehicle is small there's no distance to help soak up energy, so the force ends up transmitted to the contents even if perfectly designed. no doubt it's better than being smashed or speared, but it's still gonna hurt, and seeing the uncrushed passenger compartment that may be easy to forget.

J.

to some extent you're right, BUT, you don't need a lot of distance to absorb this stuff. you only need a few milliseconds worth of deformation. 6 m/s of impact velocity and 60cm of deformable distance is 100ms of passenger deceleration time. that's a LOT.

bottom line, you have plenty of room for the crumple zone. it's therefore much more important that the passenger cell doesn't deform. intrusion into the passenger cell, as per the frod, is where heads, femurs, pelvises get broken.